DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

A new study revealed that depolarization initiatives do not affect anti-democratic attitudes. The Strengthening Democracy Project, a team of social scientists from Northwestern and three other universities, surveyed 8,000 partisans who were randomly assigned to interventions designed to reduce affective polarization.

Aaron Rock-Singer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison joins Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast to discuss his new book, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East. The book analyzes how Salafism is a creation of the twentieth century and how its signature practices emerged primarily out of Salafis’ competition with other social movements. (Starts at 0:55). Rana Khoury of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lama Mourad of Carleton University, and Rawan Arar of the University of Washington discuss their chapter in The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research Since the Arab Uprisings, which focuses on how the region has governed and been affected by migration after the Arab Uprisings in 2011 (co-authored with Laurie Brand, Noora Lori, and Wendy Pearlman). (Starts at 28:29). Lindsay Benstead of Portland State University ...

Mneesha Gellman, assistant professor of political science at Emerson College: “I have spent much of my career decrying the way that procedural democracy—which is defined by having rules and procedures that facilitate free and fair elections—is confused for substantive democracy, in which citizens experience real democratic inclusion and empowerment beyond elections. This expanded notion of democracy is especially important for those who are the most marginalized in a given society, for example, Indigenous peoples, women and girls, and people who are incarcerated. I see President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s intention to reconfigure INE as problematic, but not necessarily for the same reasons that have been circulating in the media. Institutions are built and maintained by people; that means they are no more perfect than the people who run them. It also means institutions can change, ...

She provides critical remarks on Geo Maher's Anticolonial Eruptions.

For every reader yearning heart and soul for rationality, solace, humor and, let’s say it, anything resembling grace, after the last few years, disappearing into a book can be the best medicine, surpassing even mind-enhancing, mood-altering drugs or alcohol. Books can be better than talking to a therapist or your mother, your dog or the nearest houseplant when it comes to providing all-too rare low-cost or free comfort.

A survey of American adults found that nearly half reported having been infected with COVID-19 at least once, with 35% saying they have tested positive more than once. The report also revealed that a substantial majority of Americans have not yet received the latest bivalent booster shot. The new report provides a snapshot of the state of the pandemic at the end of 2022, including case rates, vaccine and booster shot uptake, antiviral treatment usage, mask wearing habits and flu shot rates. It sheds light on the state of vaccinations and ongoing health risks at a time when the nation is experiencing a “tripledemic” with flu, COVID-19 and the respiratory illness RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) circulating among Americans.

“The last several years in American politics have unfortunately introduced concern about political violence,” said study author James N. Druckman, the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and author of “Experimental Thinking: A Primer on Social Science Experiments.” “At the same time, the pandemic exacerbated rates of depressive symptoms such that roughly 30% of the population reported such symptoms. We were interested in understanding whether there were conditions under which the two relate to one another – with a very strong conviction that any such relationship is conditional and nuanced.” “Put another way, we are very sensitive to not stigmatizing those who suffer from depression,” Druckman explained. “We thus developed a theory that suggests the relationship depends on conspiratorial thinking and/or a participatory disposition/efficacy.”

Reno told Newsweek that he thinks "Zelensky realizes U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine has limits. He has to speak to concerns among legislators in the U.S. and governments in Europe that Ukraine is open to some sort of negotiated settlement that most pragmatic political leaders see as inevitable at some point." As for Russia's talk of negotiations, Reno said it is likely a strategy to divide Ukraine's supporters. "NATO has 30 members, each with different thresholds of risk and domestic political support for assisting Ukraine," Reno said. "Talk of a negotiated settlement lends support to those who are less inclined to provide Ukraine with resources and political backing." Reno believes the war will eventually end with a negotiated settlement because "Ukraine cannot defeat a nuclear-armed Russia," and "Russia is not capable of seizing and occupying all or a large part of Ukraine."

How do White Americans operationalize Whiteness? This article argues that religion, in conjunction with country of origin, alters how self-identified White Americans assign ethnoracial labels to other groups. To test the role of religion in White assignment, this article uses the case of Muslims and of Americans from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Although MENA individuals are legally classified as White in the United States, they are subjected to racialization and often conflated with Muslims. Using an historical analysis of racial prerequisite court cases and a survey experiment, I find that country of origin and religion play separate, additive roles in racial assignment decisions, both historically and today. These findings also extend to perceived skin tone. This is important because many of the benefits that come from being White depend on whether others perceive an ...

Reno explained a couple of hypotheses, which aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, on why Russia may be so focused on seizing Bakhmut despite the limited tactical benefits that may offer. One of these is that Putin's subordinates may not be entirely transparent with him about the true situation in Ukraine, over fears for their safety. "As with many authoritarian systems, leadership cuts itself off from information needed to make effective decisions," Reno said. Another theory is that Russia's Bakhmut offensive may "reflect Putin's efforts to balance bureaucratic forces" aligned with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Prigozhin, and even the Kadyrovtsy troops loyal to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. "Allocating different tasks across the battlefield keeps these groups in contention with one another for presidential support," Reno said. "That makes it hard for any to assert their o

Abstract: The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is a pivotal moment in strategic competition between the U.S. and Russia and their respective allies and partners. A defining element of this conflict is defending the rules-based order and the European security architecture anchored along transatlantic ties. This paper explores two elements of these transatlantic security bonds: Instrumentality of strategic communication (StratCom) and security force assistance (SFA). We argue that StratCom – a mix of information warfare, public affairs, and public relations – and SFA (i.e., helping make another military more effective) have been mutually reinforcing elements, critical for Ukrainian success thus far. Political and military leaders must master the art of strategically conveying narratives to their armed forces and civil society while tailoring foreign messaging with clear StratCom ...

William Reno, professor and chair of the political science department at Northwestern University, told Newsweek that minor advances in Bakhmut may provide Russia with tactical gains. However, he said the effort and resources drawn for such intended gains are one facet of the country's effort to build defensive positions "across the rest of the line of contact." "It is more likely that Russian offensive efforts in Bakhmut reflect Putin's style of political management in Moscow in which the main political advisors consist of Putin's former bodyguard, a caterer, and a Chechen strongman," Reno said. He said that Prigozhin's role, for example, has more to do about his own political influence in Moscow than it does about a strategic military approach. "Corrupt and divided political systems rarely manage to sustain effective armed forces," he added.

Despite significant changes in Thailand’s political landscape since 1997, many Thai political parties and candidates continue to compete for votes in general elections by offering money, favours, jobs, and preferential access to government resources to their constituents.[1] This practice, called patronage politics, has long been organised in Thailand through vote-canvassing networks (rabob huakhanaen) made up of local government officials, politicians, and influential leaders.[2] Reaching deep and wide, these networks are typically entrusted to deliver selective benefits to voters who may be expected, or persuaded, to vote for candidates preferred by the networks in return.[3]

BANGKOK Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha on Friday announced that he will be pursuing another term under the banner of the Ruam Thai Sang Chart (RTSC) party, a move that could divide the pro-military and conservative bases in the next election.

The January 6 Committee released transcripts of its interviews with Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald and national committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid about their roles in a 2020 fake elector scheme, demonstrating how Donald Trump’s campaign coordinated with the state GOP in an attempt to claim decisive electoral votes for Trump.

“At its final session, the Jan. 6 committee played a video of Donald Trump’s longtime aide Hope Hicks describing a conversation she had with the president in the tumultuous days after the 2020 election. She tried to warn him, she said, that his manic response to his defeat would destroy his legacy. He brushed her off with the toxic mix of bravado and insecurity that defines his sense of the world. ‘Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose,’ he told her. ‘The only thing that matters is winning.’ “There was the deepest danger that the Jan. 6 committee exposed. Not the president’s wild claims, his chaotic plotting, or his calls to violence, but his belief that politics is nothing more than a blood sport, to be pursued by any means necessary. And if democratic processes stand in the way of victory, then democracy be damned — as it still may be, if we don’t purge that poisonous idea ...

On December 7, Peruvian president Pedro Castillo attempted to dissolve Peru’s Congress and implement a state of emergency. His dictatorship lasted only a few hours before he was impeached by Congress and arrested—making him the fifth president to leave office in Peru in five years. Since Castillo’s arrest, Peru’s crisis has spiraled further, with protests in the streets and a violent response by the police and military that has left 25 people dead. To understand what’s going on right now in Peru, Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Rodrigo Barrenechea, a 2022/23 Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and an assistant professor at the Departamento de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad Católica del Uruguay. They talked about how and why Peru ended up here, the fragile state of the country’s democracy, an

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans have vowed to get tougher on China as they prepare to take control of the House, cheering critics of Beijing but also raising concern that one of Washington’s most important bilateral relationships could be further destabilized. Both Democrats and Republicans have grown more vigilant about China in recent years, but Republicans more often frame China’s rise as a threat to U.S. economic and national security. Although Democrats kept control of the Senate in the midterm elections last month, Republicans are in a stronger position to scrutinize President Joe Biden’s China policies with their slim majority in the House.

An Army brigadier general may face punishment for his workplace conduct while serving as the top White House military official, according to a recently released Defense Department inspector general report. The IG found that Brig. Gen. Jonathan Howerton, the director of the White House Military Office from 2019 to 2021, used vulgar language and gestures during his tenure, while potentially failing to follow government travel regulations for expenses.

"That 'win' comes at the expense of ammunition and personnel, which draws from Russian efforts to establish defensive positions elsewhere across the front," Reno said. "Russian activities around Bakhmut may point to differences within the Russian military and political leadership." While Prigozhin may view the situation as bolstering his own position in Moscow, Reno said, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu appears to support establishing a stable defensive posture.

A survey of American adults found that nearly half reported having been infected with COVID-19 at least once, with 35% saying they have tested positive more than once. The report also revealed that a substantial majority of Americans have not yet received the latest bivalent booster shot. The new report provides a snapshot of the state of the pandemic at the end of 2022, including case rates, vaccine and booster shot uptake, antiviral treatment usage, mask-wearing habits, and flu shot rates. It sheds light on the state of vaccinations and ongoing health risks at a time when the nation is experiencing a “tripledemic,” with flu, COVID-19, and the respiratory illness RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), circulating among Americans.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of responsive institutions: governments and communities coordinating policy changes; media, social networks, and officials swiftly and accurately conveying information; and an engaged public. This special issue explores social and political factors that both shaped initial response to the pandemic, and were altered by it. Institutional inequalities and variations in government response created significant differences in health outcomes even as the contagious nature of the pandemic linked spaces and people. Thus COVID-19 created new crises, exacerbated inequalities, and led to broad social changes. Social scientists will spend decades unraveling the consequences of COVID-19. This issue challenges scholars to apply existing theories and frameworks, but also to see the pandemic as an event that stimulates us to reevaluate settled paradigms.

Her move compounds the difficulties of what is promising to be a brutal Senate map in the next election cycle. Independent voters are hardly a uniform voting bloc: Generally, they just about evenly divide between those who hold liberal views and usually vote for Democrats and those who are conservative and usually vote for Republicans. The bad news for Ms. Sinema — and perhaps for Democrats — is that independent candidates rarely succeed. Without a sizable Republican or Democratic base, an independent will struggle to cobble together ideologically incompatible voters who are bonded primarily by their reluctance to publicly identify with the party they secretly support.

Although political science increasingly investigates emotions as variables, it often ignores emotions’ larger significance due to their inherence in research with human subjects. Integrating emotions into conversations on methods and ethics, I build on the term “ethnographic sensibility” to conceptualize an “emotional sensibility” that seeks to glean the emotional experiences of people who participate in research. Methodologically, emotional sensibility sharpens attention to how participants’ emotions are data, influence other data, and affect future data collection. Ethically, it supplements Institutional Review Boards’ rationalist emphasis on information and cognitive capacity with appreciation for how emotions infuse consent, risk, and benefit. It thereby encourages thinking not only about emotional harm but also about emotions apart from harm and about emotional harms apart from trau

The title of Henrik Enroth’s excellent book would come closer to its thesis and themes if it were The History of Anglo-American Political Science, Mostly, and the Should-Have-More-Consciously-Been- and Should-Still-Be Problem of Social Order. That’s too long and clumsy for a book that is anything but long or clumsy—and even then it leaves out its probing attention to sociology, historiography, and the future of political science. But it gestures to what is on offer in this relatively short but hugely ambitious book.

Ann Hartle’s What Happened to Civility offers an inviting proposition: civility should be understood as a human invention and therefore is ultimately doomed to failure. For Hartle, civility is “the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the modern Western world” (p. 1), and its inventor Michel de Montaigne’s Essays are “the first act of self-conscious civility” (p. 3). She is not alone is feeling that civility has fallen on hard times. Rather than repair civility, however, What Happened to Civility sees its failure as inevitable and returns to Montaigne to understand why.

This major new book originated in a seminar on American politics that Gregory Wawro and Ira Katznelson taught together at Columbia University. The two scholars come from different parts of the discipline: Wawro is a quantitative political scientist trained in contemporary statistical approaches to causal identification and inference, whereas Katznelson is a qualitative and historical researcher associated with American political development. Yet they share the common goal of generating social science work that adopts both the rigorous generalizing ambitions of quantitative analysis and the focus on case particularity, context, and temporality that is characteristic of historical analysis. The resulting manuscript is the latest installment in what is now a series of works in which scholars (predominantly men) associated with the qualitative and quantitative traditions join forces and offe

There is no shortage of books on Afghanistan and the wars that have ravaged that country for more than four decades. Thus, some might be hesitant to pick one on a topic—legal titling and property rights to land—that they might consider quite narrow and technical. This would be a mistake. Among the mountains of volumes on Afghanistan that have been published in the past 20 years, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Ilia Murtazashvili’s new book truly stands out. It is a must-read for all students of Afghan politics. Innovative and ambitious, Land, the State, and War is not solely about legal titling and property rights: It is also about institutions, political order, informal governance, and more.

Most African states failed to deliver the political order and economic development that liberation from colonial rule promised. This observation is at the heart of Darin Christensen’s and David Laitin’s exploration of why weak state institutions, lagging economic output, chronic corruption, authoritarian governance, and civil war violence became endemic in so many African states. The authors acknowledge that there are differences in performance and leverage information about positive cases as they build their argument for how to imagine a more democratic, secure, and prosperous continent. They render the findings of influential technical studies and graphical representations of data accessible to the reader, and provide a series of concise case studies to convey core findings. In doing so, the book provides a history of ideas and investigations about political and economic failures since

One can recall not so long ago the days of respectable techno-optimism: when the World Wide Web promised the third-way politics of the Californian Ideology, the low-stakes intrigues of You’ve Got Mail, the uncomplicated convenience of Pets.com, and the cosmopolitan community of a genuinely connected world. The Cold War was over and we now had the technology to bring the global liberal consensus into our homes and classrooms. History was ending with the scream of a dial-up modem.

Nuestro más reciente intento de dictador cayó el último miércoles, a horas de anunciar un autogolpe y la intención de convocar a un congreso constituyente. Cuando los congresistas hacían denodados esfuerzos por estirar la Constitución y remover a Pedro Castillo de la presidencia, este les dio la causal y motivación necesarias para que 101 congresistas votaran a favor de la vacancia. Y así, el autogolpe quedó en autogol.

"Griner hadn't done something wrong. She was not a real criminal, you know, Victor, was a real criminal. And so in this sense, I think Russia probably views this as winning," said Northwestern University political science professor Jordan Gans-Morse.

William Reno, a political science professor at Northwestern University, told Newsweek that unless there is more to the deal than just a one-off exchange, this arrangement will encourage Russia and other governments at odds with the U.S. to seize its citizens, posing a new national security threat and making American more vulnerable to foreign detentions. "This swap may cause them to think that detaining Americans is a good way to improve their chances of getting what they want from the US government," Reno said. "The problem with these swaps is that the solution to this one case can become a cause of more of the problem the swap was meant to address."

Gun ownership is a highly consequential political behavior. It often signifies a belief about the inadequacy of state-provided security and leads to membership in a powerful political constituency. As a result, it is important to understand why people buy guns and how shifting purchasing patterns affect the composition of the broader gun-owning community. We address these topics by exploring the dynamics of the gun-buying spike that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was one of the largest in American history. We find that feelings of diffuse threat prompted many individuals to buy guns. Moreover, we show that new gun owners, even more than buyers who already owned guns, exhibit strong conspiracy and anti-system beliefs. These findings have substantial consequences for the subsequent population of gun owners and provide insight into how social disruptions can alter the nature

Following the 2022 midterm elections — which will conclude on Tuesday, Dec. 6 with a Senate runoff election in Georgia — both Democrats and Republicans are regrouping. Republicans took control of the House by a small margin, but the “red wave” they expected did not materialize, and Democrats retained the Senate. Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 despite ongoing investigations against him, and Joe Biden seems poised to run again as well, though he has made no formal announcement. Meanwhile, major questions about the future of American democracy remain unresolved, despite losses by most election-denying candidates in swing states.

For young people, it is easily understood how being constantly told that the weight of the future lies on their shoulders can, at times, go in one ear and out the other. However, as seen with the recent midterm election, the future already seems to be upon them.

In the United States, women compose a larger share of elected Democrats than of elected Republicans at every level of government. Drawing together literature on the gender-gap in office, on voters’ use of gender stereotypes, and on women’s descriptive representation, we propose a set of hypotheses about the role of voter bias in this partisan disparity. We show that, in addition to the pipeline effects documented in the literature, voters themselves likely contribute to the partisan imbalance of women’s representation in the U.S. Using two implicit mediation experiments, we investigate the mechanism behind the partisan difference in candidate-gender preferences, providing evidence that these biases stem at least in part from stereotype-based inferences about candidate political beliefs. However, even with clear information about which candidate offers greater policy congruence, evidence

If Evanston City Council approves a 15-cents-per-bag fee on paper and plastic shopping bags, it would place Evanston among locations with the priciest such taxes in the United States.

Democratic accountability relies on voters to punish their representatives for policies they dislike. Yet, a separation-of-powers system can make it hard to know who is to blame, and partisan biases further distort voters’ evaluations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, precautionary policies were put into place sometimes by governors, sometimes by mayors, and sometimes by no one at all, allowing us to identify when voters hold out-party versus in-party politicians responsible for policies. With a survey spanning 48 states, we test our theory that attitudes toward policies and parties intersect to determine when selective attribution takes place. We find that as individuals increasingly oppose a policy, they are more likely to blame whichever level of government is led by the out-party. This is most pronounced among partisans with strong in-party biases. We provide important insight into the

As the University hub for research and education in sustainability and energy, the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN) will convene faculty and partners on Dec. 1-2 to discuss new and ongoing work that accelerates the speed, broadens the scale, and deepens the impact of climate and energy solutions worldwide.

A coalition of nonprofit leaders, researchers and program heads are pushing for Massachusetts to make college-in-prison programs a priority for the next administration. “I think there's a lot of room in this current political moment to be clear that this is something that we want to do,” said Mneesha Gellman, the founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which Emerson College launched at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord in 2017.

Roosevelt House is pleased to present a discussion of Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America by speechwriter Cody Keenan. The author will be in conversation with fellow alum of the Obama administration, former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. Spellbinding and propulsive, Grace delivers a detailed account of what Keenan considers the 10 most dramatic days of the Obama presidency. During that short but critically important period in June 2015, the nation faced a hate-fueled massacre in Charleston, a reckoning with race and the Confederate flag, and looming Supreme Court decisions on the fate of marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act. As Keenan writes, this succession of stunning developments put the character of the country on the line and set the stage for the most eagerly anticipated—and most consequential—words of Obama’s presidency.

As more countries concentrate on research and development (R&D) and innovation in the global competition for digitisation, efforts to attract highly qualified talent are increasing in scale and complexity. Globally, highly industrialised wealthy countries like the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Canada, eagerly welcome such talent with special visas. In Southeast Asia, Singapore revised and introduced its Overseas Networks & Expertise Pass in 2022, while Malaysia has promoted its “Malaysia My Second Home” (MM2H) scheme since 2002. In the same vein, Thailand aims to bring in substantial investments and qualified professionals to live and work in Thailand, to give a short-term boost to its economy.

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) is among the better providers of foreign military training (FMT) in terms of imparting technical skills, building professional relationships, and inculcating key tenets of military professionalism and civil-military relations (Jeffery 2013). We include peacekeeping, crisis management, and stability operations within this FMT framework, and recognize the value of personal interactions as deployed forces regularly work with local host-nation security forces, from the ministerial to the tactical levels, to accomplish a mission and maintain unit safety. These authors regularly encounter trainees who report CAF training has played positive roles in their professional development. Reactions of this sort and more systematic evidence indicates that Canadian FMT performs well enough in technical operational terms in enhancing recipient skills and abilities (Evaluat

Organized around eight terms in the study of religion, the groundbreaking, multifaceted book A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor combines text and image to examine the human as both catalyst of crisis and principal agent for its mitigation. Mona Oraby and Emilie Flamme—a professor and an illustrator—were spurred to create an alternative form for scholarly communication, one that stages conversations between thinkers who likely would not all find themselves in the same room. This graphic nonfiction book acknowledges the significance of certain terms to the social sciences and the humanities, narrates their limitations, and shows why we need a structure and style for thinking them otherwise. It further urges the iterative rethinking of any new terms this exercise yields. Through its unique visual lexicon, A Universe of Terms explores religious media in postcolonial and secular

“It’s a good thing we held our event today because we couldn’t have predicted what would have happened today just last week,” Prof. James Druckman commented. He then welcomed the three IPR faculty panelists—media scholar Stephanie Edgerly, who analyzed how audiences consumed news about the election; communications and policy scholar Erik Nisbet, who discussed polling data and misinformation; and political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong, who broke down what the results might mean for bipartisanship in the next Congress.

This month's oral arguments about affirmative action before the Supreme Court featured a slickly executed call-and-response between the attorney for Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) and several of the justices in the conservative majority. In his opening statement, SFFA's Cameron T. Norris, who once clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, compared "what Harvard is doing to Asians" to "what it was doing to Jews in the 1920s." Norris glided over what Harvard was doing, exactly, but his charge echoed the arguments made by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights and the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation (LDB-SVCAF) in the amicus brief they filed in support of SSFA.

Military experts and academics discussed potential developments with the war in Ukraine, including Western aid to the country and the potential use of weapons of mass destruction, in a Thursday panel at the Guild Lounge.

Over 100 service industry workers gathered Friday in the capital of South Carolina, the state with the country’s lowest unionization rate, to launch a new union and in turn try to boost labor organizing across the South.

Panelists / panelistas: - Angélica Durán-Martínez, Associate Professor; Director, Global Studies PhD Program, UMass Lowell; @UMassLowell - Javier Osorio, Assistant Professor, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona; Founder, Academia para el Análisis de Seguridad; @javier_osorio @AcademySA_AAS - Thiago Rodrigues, Professor, Institute of Strategic Studies, Universidade Federal Fluminense; Founder, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives; @thethiagor @StudiesUFF Moderators: - Ana Arjona, Associate Professor, Northwestern University; @anamarjona @PoliSciatNU @redesdal - Ken Frankel, President, Canadian Council for the Americas; @knfrankel @CCACANADA

Join a group of premier observers and analysts in a discussion about recent developments and future prospects in the war in Ukraine.

For some time now, it has been a foregone conclusion among most observers that the U.S. Supreme Court is poised by next summer to end the practice by colleges and universities of using race as a factor in admissions. Still, the intensity and occasional hostility with which the court's conservative majority grilled proponents of affirmative action at oral arguments on October 31 in two soon-to-be-landmark cases left its supporters pondering a previously unthinkable question: Will any approach to leveling the field for disadvantaged minorities be left come June, when the justices are expected to render their decision?

Deep partisan conflict in the mass public threatens the stability of American democracy. The researchers conducted a megastudy on a national sample of American partisans (n = 32,059) testing 25 interventions designed to reduce anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity. These interventions were selected from a pool of 252 interventions submitted by social scientists, practitioners, and activists as part of the Strengthening Democracy Challenge. Contrary to the expectations of expert forecasters, the authors find that nearly every selected intervention (23 out of 25) significantly reduced partisan animosity. They also identify several interventions that successfully reduced the other outcomes targeted in the Challenge – support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence – as well as a number of related secondary outcomes, including support for undemocratic candidates, ...

PhD Student Daniel Loebell has received the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies’ graduate student paper prize. The prize honors work Daniel completed as a part of his masters. The Dor Bahadur Bista Prize honors the life, career, and service of Dor Bahadur Bista, Nepal’s first anthropologist and former Honorary President of the ANHS predecessor organization, the Nepal Studies Association (NSA). The purpose of the prize is to recognize outstanding scholarship by students whose research focuses on the areas of High Asia (Hindu Kush – Karakoram – Himalaya – Tibetan Plateau) that comprise the principal interests of ANHS. Submissions from all academic disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and arts will be accepted.

In the waning weeks of Arizona’s midterm election campaign, from the red rocks in the state’s north to the desert border in its south, one word reverberated: democracy.

Imagine being the speech writer for the most powerful person in the world. That was Cody Keenan’s job. He was the chief speech writer for former President Barack Obama during some of the most pivotal times in modern American history.

Southeastern Connecticut mirrored statewide trends this election in both increased vote share for Gov. Ned Lamont compared to 2018 and in decreased turnout compared to the last midterm, according to unofficial results reported to the Connecticut Secretary of the State, which also highlight the power of incumbency.

The study is a part of the FES European Youth Studies project. It investigates the opinions of Czech youth on a broad range of topics, such as education, employment, political participation, family relationships, and values. Our findings reveal that pollution and climate change, social injustice and worries related to a global pandemic are the main worries of the Czech youth. Furthermore, they have very little interest in politics, do not want to take political functions, and are significantly less religious than their peers from the other Visegrad 4 countries. The study surveyed 1,500 respondents aged 15?29. In addition, qualitative fieldwork was conducted in the form of ten in-depth interviews and three focus-group interviews.

In the weeks before Tuesday’s midterms, researchers from the University of Chicago interviewed a diverse cross section of more than 2,000 potential Gen Z and millennial voters ages 18 to 40 to learn their views on politics and the election.

On October 18, 2019, a social uprising in Chile took many national and foreign analysts by surprise. Protests, demonstrations, arson, looting, and rioting occurred in the streets of major cities across the country, sparked by a modest rise in subway fares and a police crackdown on high school students hopping turnstiles. Demonstrators' violence and police abuse, intertwined with large-scale peaceful rallies, exposed structural conditions of social and economic inequality and a profound crisis of political representation.

Gender gaps have been documented in numerous areas of American politics, but one area that has not yet been fully explored is responsiveness, the link between citizen preferences and public policies. Equal responsiveness to the preferences of citizens is a central aspect of democratic representation. This article extends work on income gaps in responsiveness to gender gaps. Specifically, it considers whether women’s preferences are less likely than men’s preferences to be adopted as policy in the US. It uses data on preferences and policy adoptions from 1981 to 2002 created by Gilens. The main finding is a large gender gap in responsiveness. The gap is similar in size to the one between rich and poor, it is particularly large in policies related to the use of force, and it did not narrow over the two decades studied. These results show that inequalities beyond social class deserve ...

If Republicans win control of one or both congressional chambers this week, they will likely begin a project that could reshape the nation's political and legal landscape: imposing on blue states the rollback of civil rights and liberties that has rapidly advanced through red states since 2021.

Seventy-one percent of Americans now say they feel favorably about unions, the highest level of support for organized labor since the 1960s. Unfortunately, in much of America, workers who would love to be in a union face barriers to organizing, getting first contracts, and collectively bargaining. Even in historically pro-union states such as Wisconsin and Michigan, legislators have passed anti-labor “right-to-work” laws. Backed by corporate interests, these laws prevent employees from obtaining necessary representation in the workplace and deny workers opportunities to amplify their voices in political debates.

It's the final countdown before Tuesday's closely watched midterm election, and President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are hitting the campaign trail in Illinois this weekend, one last time before the crucial vote.

Latinos are the fastest growing racial and ethnic group in the U.S. electorate since the last midterm elections. A total of 34.5 million Latinos are eligible to vote, making them a crucial demographic for politicians.

As Americans head to the polls, several key personal finance issues are weighing on voters’ minds and wallets.

Both Gen Z and millennials are just as motivated to vote as they were in 2018, the GenForward survey found.

On election night, insiders say to watch the Illinois 6th Congressional District.

More than a year after he was given an analysis that raised questions about the effectiveness of Chicago police patrol response and assignments, Superintendent David Brown is now calling the study lacking, and he announced that he plans to seek his own officer deployment evaluation.

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections and Digital Democracy Projects, in collaboration with Dr. Mara Suttmann-Lea of Connecticut College and Dr. Michael Wagner of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was awarded the Evolving Election Administration Landscape Grant from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab in the fall of 2022.

Three months after its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and revoke the constitutional right to an abortion, the Supreme Court is back in session. This term, it’s taking up another major issue: the future of affirmative action.

With Democrats’ supermajority control of the General Assembly, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has enjoyed four years of pushing through major initiatives beginning with an overdue $45 billion capital construction plan, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, legalized recreational marijuana while later reducing tens of billions of dollars in debt. Additionally, a great deal of the second half of his term was spent fighting COVID-19 and weathering criticism — led by his current opponent, state Sen. Darren Bailey — over his measures to stem the spread of the potentially deadly disease.

Tom Perez, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, spoke about overseeing national political strategy at a Tuesday event hosted by Northwestern College Democrats.

Every year, over 1,000 public schools are permanently closed across the United States. And yet, little is known about their impacts on American democracy. Closed for Democracy is the ?rst book to systematically study the political causes and democratic consequences of mass public school closures in the United States. The book investigates the declining presence of public schools in large cities and their impacts on the Americans most directly affected – poor Black citizens. It documents how these mass school closure policies target minority communities, making them feel excluded from the public goods afforded to equal citizens. In response, targeted communities become superlative participators to make their voices heard. Nevertheless, the high costs and low responsiveness associated with the policy process undermines their faith in the power of political participation.

Roughly half of Americans say either the economy or inflation is the most important issue in their vote for Congress, making bread-and-butter financial issues by far the most dominant in the lead-up to the midterm elections, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Sunday.

Our research found two strategies that may help restore general social disapproval of attacks such as the one against Speaker Pelosi’s husband.

Crowded Bridge over River from Chinese Scroll Communities in China: Ethics, Laws, and Politics IN DIALOGUE WITH CHINA: ART, CULTURE, POLITICS Monday, Oct 31, 2022 4:00 pm 820 Social Sciences Building Longstanding moral visions in China describe the vital role that communities, ranging from families to the state, play in the construction of a good life. Communities define in- and out-groups, who qualifies as a stranger, and who fits comfortably within the trusted circle. Communities also define and embody various notions of justice (e.g., Confucian or socialist), which are sometimes codified in law and sometimes enshrined in lived practices. Panelists contrast visions of the good life in communities in Early China and in today's PRC, using them as distinct vantage points from which to survey a web of interrelated issues relating to the moral imagination. They ask, What is justice and ...

Methods The article analyzes public votes in a prominent award for the best football player in the world. It uses ordered probit regressions to assess the extent to which votes by players, coaches, and journalists are related to national, regional, cultural, racial, and religious affinities between voters and candidates controlling for measures of player performance and celebrity. Results The estimates indicate that while player performance does matter, a number of group-based characteristics continue to influence voting. Some of these effects appear to be rooted in incentives—a tendency to vote for co-nationals and teammates—but others—such as a tendency to vote based on geographical, racial, and religious similarities—are rooted more in group affinities.

The Associated Student Government (ASG) collects nominations for the annual Faculty & Administrator Honor Roll from the Northwestern University undergraduate student body. In the past year, over 100 students provided thoughtful and complex portraits of faculty and staff who they believe made a powerful and exceptional impact on their Northwestern experience. ASG wishes to honor the faculty and staff whose dedication and care for students led to their inclusion on this list. Congratulations to the 2021-2022 Faculty & Administrator Honorees featured below. For reference, an appendix is included at the end of this document which includes the nominated professor’s name and the class name/course number(s) they are nominated for.

A groundbreaking study published today (Oct. 31) in Nature Human Behavior, tests several depolarization interventions and finds that, while they depolarize, they do not affect anti-democratic attitudes. “Interventions that reduce the extent to which partisans do not like each other do not seem to alter or reduce the extent to which they hold anti-democratic attitudes,” said political scientist James Druckman, one of the study’s researchers. “We need to think about ways to help people see the value of democracy unto itself regardless of party.”

There is widespread concern that rising affective polarization—particularly dislike for outpartisans—exacerbates Americans’ anti-democratic attitudes. Accordingly, scholars and practitioners alike have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments towards outpartisans. Here we address this question with experimental tests (total n?=?8,385) of three previously established depolarization interventions: correcting misperceptions of outpartisans, priming inter-partisan friendships and observing warm cross-partisan interactions between political leaders. While these depolarization interventions reliably reduced affective polarization, we do not find compelling evidence that these interventions reduced support for

Institutions that protect property rights, enforce contracts, and resolve business disputes are essential for a market economy to function smoothly. These institutions may be formal or informal, ranging from courts to the reputation of prospective business partners. But in the chaotic transformation from Soviet-era economic planning to a market economy, firms in Russia came to utilize far more extreme

In using his fortune to grab hold of such an important platform, experts say, he has even inserted himself squarely in today's global political conversation. "He is not just expressing views on an instrument of communication, he now owns it and sets the policy of how that instrument will be used," Jeffrey Winters, a specialist in elites and oligarchs at Northwestern University, told Agence France-Presse. poster The question now is what he will do with that power, starting with the topic on everyone's mind: Whether or not Musk will allow former US president Donald Trump to return to the site. Without anyone to answer to, Musk "is going to change the constellation of political voices that are going to be expressed through Twitter," Winters said.

In Colombia, Indigenous, peasant and Afro-descendant groups have escalated land occupations in recent months, seeking to ensure the government carries out long-standing land redistribution promises. President Gustavo Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez, sworn in as the leaders of Colombia’s first leftist government in history in August, campaigned on a political agenda that included land redistribution.

Racial diversity on college campuses isn’t needed just for its own sake. In America, it’s a matter of social justice. From the criminalization of educating enslaved Black people to the deeply segregated and unequal public and private education systems that persist more than a half century after Brown v. Board of Education, systematic denial to Black Americans of access to quality education is a problem still awaiting a true solution.

In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration condemned Iran’s use of nuclear-fuel-cycle technologies while endorsing sensitive nuclear activities in South Korea. The politics behind this difference may appear self-evident, but maintaining this policy was premised on a complex interaction between technology and politics. This paper examines both US and international definitions of uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing and finds an incoherence between technical definitions and policy implementation. Definitions of enrichment are narrow, as they refer to a very specific set of material processes. But the Bush administration applied a capacious standard when debating what it meant for Iran to “suspend” enrichment-related activities. On the other hand, definitions of reprocessing are capacious, implicating many different processes that can be interpreted as reprocessing. And

A new course at Northwestern helps students understand the Ukraine crisis by exploring Ukrainian historical perspectives. “Slavic 390: Ukraine’s Long Fight for Independence — Literature and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe” is taught by political science Prof. Jordan Gans-Morse, Ambassador in Residence Ian Kelly, and Jewish studies and history Prof. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. Gans-Morse, Kelly and Petrovsky-Shtern designed the course to combine their three areas of expertise: history, political science and international studies. Gans-Morse focuses on the domestic, political and economic aspects of post-Soviet Ukraine, Petrovsky-Shtern focuses on Ukrainian history up to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s term and Kelly teaches about US-Ukrainian and US-Russian relations.

A discussion on the future of drug policy in Colombia. Panelists: - Isabel Pereira, Deputy Director, Dejusticia; @Dejusticia_en @Dejusticia - Santiago Tobón, Visiting Professor, University of Chicago; Professor, Economics, EAFIT; @SantiagoTobon @EAFIT - María Alejandra Vélez, Director, Center for the Study of Security and Drugs, Universidad de los Andes; @MajaVelez @CesedUniandes Co-Moderators: - Ana Arjona, Associate Professor, Northwestern University; @anamarjona @PoliSciatNU @redesdal - Ken Frankel, President, Canadian Council for the Americas; @knfrankel @CCACANADA

For a subset of individuals with acute COVID-19 disease, symptoms may persist beyond 1 month, with some patients reporting symptoms at least 6 months later.1 Initially referred to as postacute sequelae of COVID-19 or post–COVID-19 syndrome,2 this phenomenon is now more commonly described as long COVID.3 The World Health Organization4 defined long COVID as generally occurring 3 months from the onset of COVID-19 with symptoms that last for at least 2 months.

As of Oct. 3, the Supreme Court is back in session with a new slate of highly consequential cases on its docket. To better understand what is at stake, Northwestern Now spoke with faculty to learn what cases they are following and what the ramifications are likely to be.

As the United States marked the end of Hispanic Heritage Month, prominent Los Angeles Latinos were revealed to have made casually racist remarks about Black people. Anti-Blackness Latino sentiment is no surprise; within the Latino community, Afro-Latinos are rarely represented. Popular media tend to show primarily light-skinned Latinos. For instance, the movie “In the Heights,” meant to portray New York City’s Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, was criticized for whitewashing the Dominican community.

On August 8, 2022, the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, to search for classified documents, some of which were later found to contain highly sensitive foreign intelligence. But how did Americans respond to the search?

Well before Mneesha Gellman was a highly regarded political science professor at Emerson College and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, she was an idealistic teenager in northern California, fighting the logging industry to save the coastal redwoods with the hope of changing the world.

A ten-day stretch in 2015 came to define the major achievements and heartbreaks of President Barack Obama’s presidency. Chief White House speechwriter for President Obama, Cody Keenan, details what was going on behind the scenes in the administration during those days in his new book ‘Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America’ and he joined Jim Braude to discuss

Key takeaways • A large majority of Americans quickly became aware of the Mar-A-Lago search. Overall, 81 percent reported that they were aware of the search. Additionally, 82 percent of those who took the survey within a week after the search were already aware of it. • Overall, Americans approved of the search by a 51-27 margin. Another 22 percent neither supported nor opposed the search. • Democrats overwhelmingly supported the FBI search of Mar-A-Lago by an 84-3 margin. Over two thirds (69 percent) of Democrats strongly supported the search. • A strong majority of Republicans opposed the search by a 64-13 margin. Additionally, 47 percent of Republicans strongly opposed the search. • Independents were nearly twice as likely to support the search as they were to oppose it, with a 47-24 margin. Close to a third (32 percent) of independents strongly supported the search.

Politics and science have become increasingly intertwined. Salient scientific issues, such as climate change, evolution, and stem-cell research, become politicized, pitting partisans against one another. This creates a challenge of how to effectively communicate on such issues. Recent work emphasizes the need for tailored messages to specific groups. Here, we focus on whether generalized messages also can matter. We do so in the context of a highly polarized issue: extreme COVID-19 vaccine resistance. The results show that science-based, moral frame, and social norm messages move behavioral intentions, and do so by the same amount across the population (that is, homogeneous effects). Counter to common portrayals, the politicization of science does not preclude using broad messages that resonate with the entire population.

President Joe Biden wants to tame inflation. He wants Congress to protect access to abortions. He wants to tackle voting rights. And he’s taking on China, promoting construction of new factories, addressing climate change, forgiving student debt, pardoning federal marijuana convictions, cutting the deficit, working to lower prescription drug prices and funneling aid to Ukraine.

Conspiratorial beliefs can endanger individuals and societies by increasing the likelihood of harmful behaviors such as the flouting of public health guidelines. While scholars have identified various correlates of conspiracy beliefs, one factor that has received scant attention is depressive symptoms. We use three large surveys to explore the connection between depression and conspiracy beliefs. We find a consistent association, with the extent of the relationship depending on individual and situational factors. Interestingly, those from relatively advantaged demographic groups (i.e., White, male, high income, educated) exhibit a stronger relationship between depression and conspiracy beliefs than those not from such groups. Furthermore, situational variables that ostensibly increase stress—such as having COVID-19 or parenting during COVID-19—exacerbate the relationship while those that

One expert said the significance can’t be understated of what it would mean for Illinois to join the short list of states — Missouri, Hawaii and New York — with similar constitutional amendments. “A big important state like Illinois enshrining this right to their constitution sends a signal across the country that the right to bargain collectively is a fundamental right,” said Daniel Galvin, who teaches political science at Northwestern University and is a faculty fellow at the school’s Institute for Policy Research. Predictably, the fight over the Illinois measure has fallen along party lines, with Democrats backing labor and Republicans backing industry.

Cody Keenan's "GRACE: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America" is available now

Campaigning on bipartisanship might seem out of step in what’s often viewed as a hyperpolarized era. But it’s a smart strategy, said Laurel Harbridge-Yong, a political scientist at Northwestern University. The party that controls the White House typically loses seats in a president’s first midterm election, and Biden’s sputtering popularity rating, along with voter concerns about rising costs, has created conditions that benefit Republicans. “Those are all reasons why members in competitive districts want to differentiate themselves from the party and say, 'Hey, you might be frustrated with the Democrats as a whole, but here are reasons why you should still vote for me,’” Harbridge-Yong said. “Individual legislators have a greater incentive to focus on bipartisanship and compromise at a time when being tied to the party is threatening or risky.”

In 2020, Adrian Fontes oversaw the administration of elections in Arizona’s Maricopa County. With over four million residents, including Phoenix, it is by far Arizona’s most populous county. As its elected recorder, Fontes, a bearded-and-bespectacled former prosecutor, maintained the rolls on over two-and-a-half million voters. He was responsible for making sure that this swing county in a swing state held a clean, fair election as Joe Biden and Donald Trump squared off. A former Marine, Fontes knew how to fight, but he couldn’t have anticipated the battle that awaited him.

Although ethnocentrism, out-group prejudice, and racial threats strongly predict American political attitudes and voter behaviour, how social movements predicated on these beliefs shape political outcomes is rarely considered. In an article recently published in American Politics Research, Weiner and Zellman (2022) argue that white nationalist activities significantly contribute to the radicalization of Congressional representatives’ policy agendas in a manner non-reducible to demographic or socioeconomic conditions. By mobilizing white voters against racial status threats, they indirectly compel politicians to adopt more radically conservative agendas. To answer the key question of the extent to which white nationalists influence Congressional representative conservatism in US politics, they quantitatively test the stated propositions by examining distributions of white nationalist grou

Every year, over 1,000 public schools are permanently closed across the United States. And yet, little is known about their impacts on American democracy. Closed for Democracy is the ?rst book to systematically study the political causes and democratic consequences of mass public school closures in the United States. The book investigates the declining presence of public schools in large cities and their impacts on the Americans most directly affected – poor Black citizens. It documents how these mass school closure policies target minority communities, making them feel excluded from the public goods afforded to equal citizens. In response, targeted communities become superlative participators to make their voices heard. Nevertheless, the high costs and low responsiveness associated with the policy process undermines their faith in the power of political participation. ...

While some political science scholarship and commentary on Palestinian politics engages Palestinian society as a topic of empirical scrutiny and theoretical significance, much of it either ignores society-level actors and dynamics or regards them as superfluous. Accordingly, society factors into the political story to the degree that it absorbs Israeli policies, is manipulated by self-interested factions, or is pushed to extremism by repression or religious radicalism. This special issue pushes against these trends. This introduction begins with an illustration of the problem, using the example of protest and how, for a century, many commentaries dismiss the societal groundings of mobilization. The essay then reviews a broad interdisciplinary scholarship that offers an alternative approach and the new contribution made by each of the five research articles in this issue.

Such turmoil has raged since Barack Obama left the White House in January 2017 that his presidency feels like it unfolded in a distant age. While history’s judgments take decades, it is already clear that the two terms of the first Black President triggered a backlash that has shaped America ever since. He was, after all, succeeded by Donald Trump, who got his political start by authoring a racist and false conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States.

Latino workers represent a large and growing share of the U.S. workforce. But even with the highest employment rates in the United States, Latinos face a number of barriers to accessing good jobs and economic security. Their median earnings are lower than those of their Black, White, and Asian American counterparts. And along with Black workers, Latino workers tend to be especially vulnerable to losing their jobs amid economic contractions.

Interestingly, the researchers find a large “partisan approval gap” between Republican and Democratic incumbents, with Republican voters rating Republican governors lower than Democratic voters' ratings of Democratic governors. Independents also contribute to that gap as they tend to assess Democratic governors more highly than Republican ones. “The differences in gubernatorial approval, with Democrats expressing more enthusiasm for their party’s governors than Republicans do for their party’s, could be notably consequential if it influences turnout, said IPR political scientist James Druckman. “And turnout surely will play a crucial role in some of these close races.” Druckman co-authored the report with scholars from Harvard, Rutgers, and Northeastern universities as part of the COVID States Project.

However, we do find substantial overlap between the interventions that affect partisananimosity and those that affect a number of important outcomes, including biased evaluation ofpoliticized facts, general social distrust, and preferences for social distance from outpartisans. Wealso found that support for undemocratic candidates was moved by interventions that affecteither partisan animosity or support for undemocratic practices, suggesting two separate causalpaths. Taken together, our findings provide a toolkit of promising interventions for practitioners,and shed new theoretical light on challenges facing American democracy.

The CSDD’s Evanston Reparations Research Collaborative will examine the ordinance’s impact on public sentiments about race relations within the Evanston community and the functioning of municipal government. The collaborative’s advisory board will bring together city officials, social science researchers and civic leaders to help oversee the project. The research will be conducted by a team of undergraduate students who will work in the field. A graduate student will design and implement the studies, as well as train the field researchers. The collaborative is led by CSDD director Alvin B. Tillery, professor of political science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and a resident of Evanston.

SESP Prof. Tabitha Bonilla said areas with high average incomes and education levels like Evanston tend to see higher voter turnout in general. People in lower-income areas, however, may face various barriers to voting. Hourly wage workers may lose income when taking time off to go vote. People of color are also more likely to encounter difficulties when voting, with Black and Latino voters often facing longer lines at polls, according to recent data from the Brennan Center. “If it is harder for you to vote, it’s less likely that you’re going to be able to,” Bonilla said.

When a majority of council members vote to approve a draft of the budget, it is adopted as policy for the next calendar year. Board member Kimberly Marion Suiseeya suggested implementing an accountability system through a city ordinance, such that the city’s budget is required to include CARP goals for it to be legal and valid. She said this could help reinforce CARP against mission drift and apathy from city officials into the future. “You can’t have it relying on the city manager and the political will of the city council to do these things,” Marion Suiseeya said. “If you have something as ambitious as CARP with no strong implementation mechanisms, then you’re constantly pushing against the forces that don’t necessarily need to be there.”

In 2013, a groundbreaking report from the Environmental Change & Security Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center warned that efforts to cut planet-heating pollution and climate impacts could spark conflict, undercutting development and global security. The “backdraft” dynamic described in that report has since been echoed in concepts like “maladaptation” and “mal-mitigation” - where climate policies produce adverse impacts on marginalized or politically excluded populations.

Alvin Tillery, professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, has long studied racial inequality in the United States. He says the toxic legacy of European and British colonialism is everywhere. “It’s impossible for me to do my work as a scholar of these kinds of modern racial inequalities in America and not see the fingerprints of British colonials everywhere,” said Tillery. “The threads are intimately connected. The American race story starts with the Royal African Company.” The Royal Africa Company was founded in 1660 by the Duke of York, the brother of then King Charles II, who went on to become King James II and transported enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas.

Watch George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies and the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy's (TIMEP) virtual discussion marking the launch of a new special issue of the Arab Law Quarterly titled: “Authoritarianism in the Arab World.” The special issue, the in-print publication of which is forthcoming in October 2022, brings together young and mid-career scholars of law and policy with practitioners from and in the Arab world to unpack how the law has been leveraged by governments, lawyers, and civil society organizations to entrench, reverse, and challenge authoritarianism in the region. Three of the issue’s authors will join in conversation with each other, with introductory remarks by the issue’s co-editor, Nathan Brown (George Washington University) and Wendy Pearlman (Northwestern University) serving as discussant.

The sacralization of the Israeli state is especially noxious to the two prominent Palestinian editors of this volume, and understandably so. Noting that most discussions of religion in politics have focused on non-state actors, their collection ably turns the tables to examine and critique the sacralization of the state and its role in perpetuating settler colonial violence in Israel and beyond. To this end, the editors thoughtfully juxtapose case studies that are rarely considered side-by-side, including Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, Zionism in Israel/Palestine, competing nationalisms in Northern Ireland, and Hindutva in India—even as Zionism gets the lion’s share of attention. I was eager to dive in.

The study is funded by the Lewis-Sebring Family Foundation. The center is partnering with the National Opinion Research Center and is in the drafting phase of the study. Tillery estimates he will have results of the research by early spring. Tillery said he is conducting this study to see what concerns residents have and hopefully dispel the assumption that reparations efforts cause racial resentment. “I think that it’s very likely that in a place like Evanston – highly educated, more affluent than the average community, that values diversity and tolerance – it’s very likely that we don’t see these spikes of resentment,” Tillery said.

To understand the demonstrations from a Western perspective, but with the rigor of someone who has studied the subject in depth, La Tercera spoke with the American political scientist Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, professor of Political Science and Religious Studies and an expert on the Middle East at Northwestern University. A week after the death of the young Mahsa Amini, the protests in Iran have not abated. What are the keys to understanding what is currently happening in the country? Iranians, and in particular women from all walks of life, are demonstrating to call for a democratic transformation in Iran. It is both a continuation of previous movements calling for reforms, and a new spontaneous movement founded on women's organization and protest against state regulation, repression and violence.

This project seeks to learn the impact of publicly engaged scholarship and contribute to diversifying the academic community. The study will measure the social and research impact of public engagement, or scholars communicating beyond academic audiences and sharing their expertise with a broader, more general audience. There is a small but growing academic literature that shows scholarship that is publicly engaged can have greater academic and societal reach, but there is little empirical evidence of this relationship between engagement and reach when it comes to social science research. To examine whether and the extent to which there is such a relationship, this study will use a randomized controlled trial involving different public engagement strategies that publicize social science scholarship and measure indicators of academic and societal reach. The study will include a survey...

Causas urgentes dialogó con la politóloga de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Ely Orrego Torres acerca de los desafíos que se presentan entre la religión y la política, principalmente en Latinoamérica, en el marco del curso que inicia el 31 de agosto y se denomina "Estado laico en América Latina: perspectivas feministas" el cual se encuentra enmarcado en una Escuela de Formación junto a la ONG “Otros Cruces” mediante un contexto crítico.

American democracy is at risk, Stanford scholars and others have warned. A Stanford-led project has identified a number of strategies that are effective in reducing Americans’ support for undemocratic practices and candidates. (Image credit: Getty Images) Many studies have found anti-democratic attitudes and support for partisan violence are at concerning levels among the American public, partisan animosity is growing, and Americans are willing to compromise democratic principles for partisan gain. Stanford sociologist Robb Willer is among those worried about what these attitudes mean for the stability of democracy in the U.S. To counter some of the risks Willer and many Americans are troubled by, Willer launched a massive, three-year project to test a variety of simple and scalable ways to counter anti-democratic beliefs that threaten the country’s political future.

American democracy is at risk, Stanford scholars and others have warned. A Stanford-led project has identified a number of strategies that are effective in reducing Americans’ support for undemocratic practices and candidates. (Image credit: Getty Images) Many studies have found anti-democratic attitudes and support for partisan violence are at concerning levels among the American public, partisan animosity is growing, and Americans are willing to compromise democratic principles for partisan gain. Stanford sociologist Robb Willer is among those worried about what these attitudes mean for the stability of democracy in the U.S. To counter some of the risks Willer and many Americans are troubled by, Willer launched a massive, three-year project to test a variety of simple and scalable ways to counter anti-democratic beliefs that threaten the country’s political future.

"Historically, when social scientists thought of advanced democracies, including the United States, they didn’t really think about things like democratic backsliding. But the last five years have seen a rise of concern about authoritarian tendencies in the United States. It seems evident that a lot of partisans on either side would potentially privilege their party over democratic processes. So what can we do to try to ameliorate those tendencies? Because we might start seeing real undermining of not only democratic norms, but actual constitutional procedures, and then violence."

ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) today announced the selection of 10 research projects for its inaugural Center for Antisemitism Research Fellowship, which engages leading university researchers in identifying new approaches to combating antisemitism in society. Does correcting misinformation or cultivating empathy reduce antisemitism? Dr. Catie Bailard, associate professor of media and public affairs, George Washington University; Andrew Thompson, assistant professor of political science, GWU; and Rebekah Tromble, Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics,...

One thing he offered was proof that it is possible to break out of entrenched ways of thinking about one’s place in the world. He brought the Cold War to an end by refusing to see the world as a zero-sum status contest with the U.S. He came to leadership in a world where it was taken for granted that the U.S. and the USSR were in competition with each other. “This competition was seen as natural, inevitable and zero-sum. Both governments chose their policies on the assumption that the most important thing was to keep up appearances of being stronger than the other. Gorbachev seemed to know that there was nothing inevitable about fighting for scraps of status around the world, and that the costs of doing so were unacceptable. And so he stepped out of the competitive paradigm and sought to invest in improving domestic conditions instead. He scrambled American foreign policy by refusing...

Local election officials are trying to share voting information with the public on social media but may be missing some key platforms – and the voters who use them. In early July 2022, for instance, young voters in Boone County, Missouri, complained that they had missed the registration deadline to vote in the county’s Aug. 2 primary election. They claimed no one “spread the word on social media.” The local election office in that county actually has a social media presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. But its accounts don’t have many followers and aren’t as active as, say, celebrity or teenage accounts are. As a result, election officials’ messages may never reach their audience.

Research by IPR political scientist Daniel Galvin, however, shows that union influence has remained significant. During the period of union membership decline from 1973 to 2014, states with higher rates of union membership passed more employment laws and created a wider range of rights and protections for workers than states with less of a union presence. According to Galvin, 90% of U.S. workers do not belong to a union and must look to employment laws to protect their rights instead. But where did these laws come from, and why do some states have more robust regulatory regimes than others? “I find that unions were largely responsible for their construction,” Galvin said. “Even as they were hemorrhaging members and struggling to survive, they were leading legislative campaigns to create stronger protections for all workers.”

Research by IPR political scientist Daniel Galvin, however, shows that union influence has remained significant. During the period of union membership decline from 1973 to 2014, states with higher rates of union membership passed more employment laws and created a wider range of rights and protections for workers than states with less of a union presence. According to Galvin, 90% of U.S. workers do not belong to a union and must look to employment laws to protect their rights instead. But where did these laws come from, and why do some states have more robust regulatory regimes than others? “I find that unions were largely responsible for their construction,” Galvin said. “Even as they were hemorrhaging members and struggling to survive, they were leading legislative campaigns to create stronger protections for all workers.”

A Northwestern University-led research team has received a $5 million grant over five years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop new methods to help mitigate the effects of climate change on the Great Lakes and its surrounding natural ecosystems. By partnering with Indigenous and Native American scientists, conservation agencies and government agencies, the team will focus on manoomin (the Ojibwe word for wild rice), a critical — yet declining — part of the Great Lakes ecosystem and a sacred food that connects Native communities to the land.

A Northwestern University-led research team has received a $5 million grant over five years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop new methods to help mitigate the effects of climate change on the Great Lakes and its surrounding natural ecosystems. By partnering with Indigenous and Native American scientists, conservation agencies and government agencies, the team will focus on manoomin (the Ojibwe word for wild rice), a critical — yet declining — part of the Great Lakes ecosystem and a sacred food that connects Native communities to the land.

Michelle Bueno Vasquez is a Ph.D. candidate in political science and a Master’s candidate in statistics. Michelle’s research explores the development of racial categories transnationally between the United States and Latin America. Her work deals specifically with the export of white supremacist and anti-Black standards through U.S. military occupations in the area and their influence on the political and social development in Latin American nations. She also explores the evolution of Census racial categories, particularly looking at Afro-Latino erasure in statistical methodology. In her dissertation, she examines these themes through the case study of the Dominican Republic and its diaspora in the U.S., providing insights into how Afro-Latinos make sense of their racial identity and Black consciousness in the here and now.

The last decade has given rise to substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the U.S. Manifestations include decreased trust in government, conspiratorial beliefs, contentious protests, and support for political violence. Surprisingly, prior work has not explored how these attitudes and behaviors relate to gun-buying, an action that provides people with the means to challenge the state. The researchers address this topic by focusing on individuals who took part in the unprecedented gun buying surge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a survey with over 50,000 respondents, they find that— relative to other Americans—pandemic gun buyers are more likely to distrust government, believe in conspiracies, protest, and support political violence. Moreover, the authors find that gun buyers who hold anti-government views and attend protests are especially likely to say they bought guns...

As the West debates defence spending to counter China and Russia, an affordable approach for constructive influence is possible through advising missions that create Sustainable Development Engineering Corps (SDECs) in militaries throughout Africa. Through interviews and surveys of defence officials, Nils Zimmermann, Ivor Wiltenburg and Jahara Matisek find strong support for using European militaries for cost-effective contributions to Western global force posture by creating and deploying advisor units focused on helping African partner militaries establish SDECs.

Every year, the Journal of the History of Ideas awards the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history. The winner of the 2021 prize is Ross Carroll, for Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain, published by Princeton University Press. The judging committee writes: In his compelling and cogent Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain, Ross Carroll provides a striking historical analysis of debates over the political power and moral force of humor. Across a range of source materials, with insightful close readings balanced by sensitive contextualization, Carroll’s history draws out the potentialities attributed to ridicule. Carroll points to a framework for understanding the historical affordances of ridicule that remains resonant in the present day, contrasting Hobbesian reproofs with the measured embrace associated with Shaftesbury.

Bonnie Honig's book, Shell-Shocked: Feminist Criticism after Trump, is a sharp, urgent, and sophisticated critique of Trumpism's many facets. But it is not any kind of critique: it is a feminist critique of Trumpism's policies, gestures, affects, and legacies. Suggestive in Honig's book is the proposal of a specific type of intense sensorial disposition that fem­inist criticism can work with and through; a kind of alternative epistemology of aware­ness where psychic stability and a sense of reality depend upon a heightened attention to detail. Attention to detail links the stories of public writing reunited and reworked in the book. Following the example of Penelope in Homer's Odyssey, who promises to choose a "suitor" after finishing a shroud but gains time by weaving during the day and unweaving at night, Honig finds a loose thread in the fabric of the political and pulls, until the...

Affective polarization in the United States - the gap between individuals' positive feelings toward their own political party and negative feelings toward the opposing party - has increased markedly in the past two decades. We review recent scholarship on affective polarization, focusing on causes, social and political consequences, and antidotes. This work shows a link between affective polarization and some concerning behaviors such as deleterious reactions to COVID-19. However, connections between affective polarization and dire political outcomes such as democratic backsliding and violence remain unclear. While possible antidotes to affective polarization focus on correcting stereotypes or priming common identities, more work is needed to determine which causes and antidotes apply most directly to political consequences.

Affective polarization in the United States - the gap between individuals' positive feelings toward their own political party and negative feelings toward the opposing party - has increased markedly in the past two decades. We review recent scholarship on affective polarization, focusing on causes, social and political consequences, and antidotes. This work shows a link between affective polarization and some concerning behaviors such as deleterious reactions to COVID-19. However, connections between affective polarization and dire political outcomes such as democratic backsliding and violence remain unclear. While possible antidotes to affective polarization focus on correcting stereotypes or priming common identities, more work is needed to determine which causes and antidotes apply most directly to political consequences.

When considering where public opinion originates--that is , where people's opinions, attitudes, and ideas about politics even come from in the first place--one near-certain factor is their partisanship: in the United States (US), whether they identify as a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, but the phenomenon is evident across the globe as well.

Both campaigns have tried to install that the reforms will continue beyond the result of the plebiscite. However, it is wrong to assume that both scenarios are analogous in terms of the real possibility that these changes will be carried out. The Agreement of November 15, 2019 is clear: if the option to reject the proposal is won, the current Constitution remains in force. This does not prevent a reform process from starting, but it definitely does not ensure it.

A recent study by IPR political scientist Chloe Thurston and David Karol of the University of Maryland examines voting records of California state legislators from the 1960s–1990s to understand the growing ties between the Republican Party and the Christian Right and the Democratic Party and feminist organizations. The researchers show how legislators in California, one of the first states to pass legislation dealing with abortion, shifted from voting on abortion issues based on their religious beliefs to aligning with the emerging views of their political parties.

Existing studies on the contemporary U.S. urban-rural divide have neglected its potential role in non-voting political participation. Theoretically, there are mixed expectations: for example, higher social capital in rural areas, alongside a generally older population, suggest rural areas should have greater political participation. Conversely, lower socioeconomic indicators and more physical distance barriers suggest the opposite. Using nationally stratified survey data from the 2018 CCES (N = 61,000) and 2020 CES (N = 60,000), we find that specific participation behaviors do not consistently vary across the urban-rural spectrum, controlling for demographic variables.

During the four years of the Trump administration, American strategy adopted a provocative realpolitik approach to American power. Trump’s administration was so focused on U.S. nationalism and threats to American identity that domestic immigration policies became viewed as existential threats. With the introduction of great power competition discourse against China and Russia 2017, a renewed U.S. emphasis on conventional military power and traditional warfare ignores the reality of an increasingly globalized, interconnected world. China and Russia have grown their regional spheres of influence while making in-roads elsewhere with asymmetric tools of influence. While debates rage about how to confront China and Russia through projection of military and economic power, we ask: What can the U.S. do in the long-term to out-compete illiberal authoritarian states? ...

This Focused Hub will use a holistic, transdisciplinary approach to untangle the interconnected human, coastal, and climate change issues causing region-wide manoomin decline in the Western Great Lakes. The Hub will advance scientific capacity to measure, understand, and predict changes in coastal wetland ecosystems, focusing on manoomin as a vital sentinel species. Direct partnerships with Native Nations and Communities will affirm local sovereignty over coastal land, water, and ecosystems, and inform resilience decisions at community, tribal, national, state, and regional levels. The Hub will increase coastal community capacity through community engagement, knowledge co-production, and training a new generation of scientists and leaders from currently underrepresented communities in the region.

The emergent literature on citizen forecasting suggests that the public, in the aggregate, can often accurately predict the outcomes of elections. However, it is not clear how citizens form judgments about election results or what factors influence individual predictions. Drawing on an original survey experiment conducted during the campaign for the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum, we provide novel evidence of what influences citizen forecasts in a so-far unexplored context of direct democracy. Specifically, we investigate the effect of voting preferences and political sophistication, in addition to three “exogenous factors” that we manipulate experimentally—i.e., social cues, elite cues and campaign arguments. Our findings indicate that citizens are reasonably accurate in their predictions, with the average forecast being close to the actual result of the referendum.

The Shadow of Totalitarianism develops a new way to think about the problem of evil in politics. Beginning with the commonplace idea that the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century marked the emergence of a new form of evil, Javier Burdman finds early seeds of thinking about this form in Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy. Far from being an isolated object of inquiry, evil, Burdman argues, has long shaped and been central to philosophical understandings of political action and judgment. Systematically analyzing the relationship between evil, action, and judgment in the work of Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, The Shadow of Totalitarianism aligns evil in politics with a desire for moral certainty, hence the emphasis on the need to accept and affirm uncertainty in current ethical theories. The careful philosophical analysis through which Burdman develops this inquiry

The study of environmental politics in Latin America and the Caribbean expands as conflicts stemming from the deterioration of the natural world increase. Yet this scholarship has not generated a broad research agenda similar to the ones that emerged around other key political phenomena. This Element seeks to address the lack of a comprehensive research agenda in Latin American and Caribbean environmental politics and helps integrate the existing, disparate literatures. Drawing from distributive politics, this Element asks who benefits from the appropriation and pollution of the environment, who pays the costs of climate change and environmental degradation, and who gains from the allocation of state protections.

Healthy democratic polities feature competing visions of a good society but also require some level of cooperation and institutional trust. Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an ‘us versus them’ mentality dominates. Despite a vast multidisciplinary literature, no coherent conceptual framework of the microlevel dynamics that increase or decrease polarization has been presented. In this Review, we provide a conceptual framework to integrate scientific knowledge about cognitive–motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted. Ego-justifying and group-justifying motives lead individuals to defend their own pre-existing beliefs and those of their in-group, respectively. However, a distinct class of system-justifying motives contributes to asymmetric forms of polarization.

2022 APSA Award Winners Announced including Northwestern Ph.D., University of Miami Assistant Professor, Matthew Nelsen, named the co-recipient of the E.E. Schattschneider Award for the best dissertation in the field of American government for his dissertation, "Educating for Empowerment: Race, Socialization, and Reimagining Civic Education”

When Goodluck Nwauzor arrived at the U.S. southern border in May 2016, he hoped his nightmare was over and that the American dream was within reach. Nwauzor, formerly a small business owner in Nigeria, became a target of the violent militant group Boko Haram. When they burned his business and home to the ground, he fled and traveled for six months through South and Central America before arriving at the U.S. border. “I said I would like to have asylum,” Nwauzor would later testify in court. “I believe my life will be safe if I find myself in America.” Instead, he was detained in a center in Tacoma, Washington. It was there he found himself cleaning showers for the 50-60 other migrants in his pod seven days a week, earning only $1 a day.

Traditionally, political debates have been shaped by mainstream media. Kenya’s mainstream media, however, remain strongly wedded to factional ethnic and class interests. This has undermined their capacity to facilitate fair and open debate, most evidently during elections. Social media platforms have exploited this trust deficit, acting as important alternative sites for political deliberation. But they have also become powerful tools for disinformation and misinformation.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Kimberly Marion Suiseeya similarly has made significant progress on revising a chapter of her book manuscript on environmental politics and Indigenous communities. “What I needed was protected time and space—two things I could not access in these last two-plus years,” she said. “Thus far, this retreat has provided what I needed most to reset productivity in my work. I didn’t imagine I could actually finish my revisions on this chapter this week, yet now I see the end in sight.”

THE STUDY OF GROUPS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE has been transformed by the critique of essentialism: groups cannot be discussed as clearly bounded, homogenous, and impermeable. This is evident in the established status of constructivism and instrumentalism in the study of ethnicity in comparative politics, and in the existence of a debate about whether cultures exist and how they should be identified in political theory. The critique of essentialism has immensely improved the study of groups, banishing lazy assumptions about value consensuses or other psychological dispositions existing across entire societies. Yet many of the claims that flow out of this critique—namely, that individuals can easily move in and out of groups, changing allegiance according to their self-interest, and that groups are constantly in flux—are not entirely unproblematic. The persistence of groups, the attachment ...

The events surrounding the 2020 U.S. election and the January 6 insurrection have challenged scholarly understanding of concepts like collective action, radicalization, and mobilization. In this article, we argue that online far-right radicalization is better understood as a form of distributed cognition, in which the groups’ online environment incentivizes certain patterns of behavior over others. Namely, these platforms organize their users in ways that facilitate a nefarious form of collective intelligence, which is amplified and strengthened by systems of algorithmic curation. In short, these platforms reflect and facilitate undemocratic cognition, fueled by affective networks, contributing to events like the January 6 insurrection and far-right extremism more broadly. To demonstrate, we apply this framing to a case study (the “Stop the Steal” movement) to illustrate how this ...

Colombia se encamina hacia una elección decisiva y acá te contamos cómo fue la primera vuelta, qué proponen los dos candidatos y el papel que juega Estados Unidos.

One morning soon after we arrived in Beirut this summer the state-supplied electricity came on at seven and stayed on. It was still on at eight, still on at nine, still on at ten, still on at eleven. We did a few rounds of laundry; we even ran the dryer. We turned on the air conditioners and could not bring ourselves to turn them off even when the house got cold. The electricity was still on when we left at noon. It was out by the time we returned from lunch and never came back for more than an hour a day in the weeks that followed. ‘Why is the light out?’ our toddler asks. Because there is no electricity, we tell him. Why is there no electricity? Because in Lebanon sometimes there is no electricity. Why? Because there is no state, I say, only half joking. Why? We prod him down the stairs. He has taken to chanting in Arabic ‘the state has come,’ shorthand for the state-supplied...

What makes a legislator effective? The Thompson Center presents a virtual event that explores the elements of measuring legislative success. Featuring a panel of five speakers, each will share their expertise on lawmaking, followed by audience Q&A. Craig Volden is Co-Director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking and a Professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia. Laurel Harbridge-Yong is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Beatriz Rey is a SNF Agora Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and an APSA Congressional Fellow (2021-2022) working at the U.S. House of Representatives. Jeffery Mondak is the James M. Benson Chair in Public Issues and Civic Leadership in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois. Walter Stone...

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision has reignited fears among liberals and progressives of the fall of the wall between church and state. Yet the wall of separation is only a metaphor, and a tired and strained one at that. When people try to defend access to abortion by trying to keep religion out, they are assuming a lot about religion. If religion were cordoned off from public life, they say, democracy and equality would flourish. This is a deeply flawed story. First, a majority of Americans, across traditions, support access to safe abortion. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 61% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. More than half of U.S. Catholics favor legal abortion, a 2019 Pew Research Center survey found.

Recent studies have identified the revival of the idea of democracy in early nineteenth-century French thought. This article recovers one important reason behind this revival: democracy became a response to another debate that emerged during that period—the “social question.” Although not well known in the English-speaking world, Louis Blanc was one of the most important socialist figures during the July Monarchy in France. Examining Blanc's Organization of Labor, this article shows how Blanc mobilized democracy to challenge the July Monarchy's exclusionary representative government and its reduction of the “social question” to pauperism. Blanc argued that industrial competition created a system of domination and proposed democratic reorganization of labor as a way to promote the common good. Blanc reformulated the “social question” as a democratic question, arguing that poverty ...

Exile is often considered a useful political solution that can coax violent or unpopular leaders out of power. But these “golden parachutes” may come with a price. Specifically, do exiled leaders increase instability back in their home countries? In this paper, we outline the mechanisms through which exiled rulers can destabilize their home state’s politics and ultimately increase conflict. We present two types of evidence to support the argument. The first is a cross-national analysis that uses our original Leaders in Exile dataset to examine how exiled leaders shape the likelihood of civil conflicts, coups, and protests. The second is a cross-leader analysis designed to minimize inferential concerns by comparing cases where leaders escape into exile with cases where leaders are killed. In both tests, we find that exiled leaders are linked to political instability ...

Sally Nuamah (Northwestern University) will examine how experiences with the criminal justice system impacts political participation among Black women. Grants were made in our four core programs and our special initiative on Immigration and Immigrant Integration.

"We argue that American political development's (APD's) relentless preoccupation with the substantive problems that shape and animate American politics and how they emerge and develop over time has been a key source of the subfield's durability. We elaborate on three main payoffs to conceptualizing APD as a problem-driven enterprise: (1) it highlights APD's main comparative advantage within the American politics subfield, noting the tremendous agility APD's substantive breadth lends the enterprise; (2) it resolves the methodological debate, granting simply that the question chooses the method rather than the other way around; and (3) it reorients the critique: simply because a subfield considers itself to be problem-oriented does not mean that it is identifying the right problems to study."

“The public’s opinions on abortion are certainly nuanced — their opposition to no access under any circumstance is very clear, but they also support restrictions based on viability,” said political scientist James Druckman, one of the consortium researchers. “This makes it a complicated issue with limited mobilizational capacity for the Democrats. The bulk of Democrats live in states that have laws consistent with their preferences and it is unlikely Republicans in states with highly restrictive laws would shift their voting patterns due to the issue.”

IPR experts detail the sweeping effects on survivors and communities—and discuss policies to help prevent them. Beyond lifetime career and mental health consequences, research shows that a school shooting can also shift how people vote in communities where one occurred. Political scientist and IPR associate Ana Arjona and her colleagues, Laura García-Montoya (PhD 2020) and Matthew Lacombe (PhD 2019), investigate how. “When we think about debates about what can be done to reduce school shootings, political action is very important, especially as polarization grows in the country,” Arjona said. “Looking at school shootings allows you to try to understand how people respond to a very particular form of violence.”

Most Americans do not work in industries threatened by foreign imports, nor are they aware of the economic benefits of free trade or of how different trade policies can affect their lives. Despite this, Americans do have opinions on trade and, in many cases, strong ones. Diana Mutz reconciles these seemingly paradoxical observations, arguing that Americans are not motivated by economic self-interest. Instead, many see trade as an arena for global competition and equate trade between states to their own interpersonal relationships. The result is a host of trade preferences that are more nuanced than most economic theories acknowledge.

A panel discussion on life as a historical sociologist, featuring Maryam Alemzadeh, Tony Chen, Lis Clemens, Marisela Martinez-Cola, Chris Muller, and Angel Adams Parham. Comparative Historical Analysis and Theory, also known as CHAT (yes — we’re really proud of the acronym!), provides a space for continued conversation between SSHA and ASA.

Corruption often persists not only because public officials take bribes, but also because many citizens are willing to pay them. Yet even in countries with endemic corruption, few people always pay bribes. Why do citizens bribe in some situations but not in others? Integrating insights from both principal-agent and collective action approaches to the study of corruption, the authors develop an analytical framework for understanding selective bribery. Their framework reveals how citizens’ motivations, costs, and risks influence their willingness to engage in corruption. A conjoint experiment conducted in Ukraine in 2020 provides substantial corroboration for 10 of 11 pre-registered predictions. By shedding light on conditions that dampen citizens’ readiness to pay bribes, the researchers’ findings offer insights into the types of institutional reforms that may reduce corruption.

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the ...

"Investigations into how promises matter to voters, whether during campaigns for a new office or when running for reelection, reveal that voters have a nuanced understanding of promises that is dependent on assessments of candidate attentions as well as the successful policy interventions. Bonilla builds on that work and the long literature on motivated reasoning to examine how voters use partisanship in their decisions of promise fulfillment. With two original survey experiments, she demonstrates that voters view promise fulfillment through a partisan lens when an issue is a partisan issue, and particularly when there is ambiguity around if the promise is kept. This finding suggests nuance to the traditional assumptions around how promise fulfillment is assessed in reelection campaigns."

On March 28, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that effectively bans discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida’s schools. The so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill creates new restrictions on classroom speech around LGBT people and same-sex families, and empowers parents to sue a school if the policy is violated, chilling any talk of LGBT themes lest schools or teachers face potentially costly litigation.

Recién empieza a asentarse el resultado electoral del pasado domingo 19 de junio. Gustavo Petro Urrego logró ser elegido presidente, con el 50,4 % de los votos válidos. Rodolfo Hernández obtuvo en 47,3 %. En vísperas de la segunda vuelta, muchos cuestionaban la capacidad que podría tener Petro de crecer, pues se asumía que casi la totalidad de los votos de las opciones que perdieron en primera vuelta podrían ir a Hernández. No obstante, Petro logró vencer las proyecciones de la simple aritmética electoral.

Professor Mara Suttman-Lea with Connecticut College talks about the hearings of Fox 61.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University) participó con su conferencia “Mysteries of State: National Security as Political Theology” en el marco del Coloquio "Religiosidades insumisas, protestas sociales y democracias hoy" el miércoles 22 de Junio del 2022 en la Universidad de los Andes.

In January 2020, I visited the US-Mexico border as a part of a group trip to northern Sonora with Border Community Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Tubac, Arizona.1 We crossed into Mexico at Nogales, a city bisected by the border and often called “Ambos Nogales” (“Both Nogales”) for that reason. While at the border I was struck by a sense of inevitability and banality; the relaxed posture of a US border official on his bike at Morley Gate (Figure 1) speaks to this feeling. Contributing to this laid-back atmosphere was the fact that my traveling companion, a fellow US citizen, and I were able to cross back and forth at will between the US and Mexico, as if passing through a metro station. At the end of our trip to Sonora, after crossing over to the US to check into our hotel, we decided to go back to Mexico for happy hour at La Roca, a bar nestled into a picturesque cliff fac

In August of 2017, the New York Times ran a brief vignette, accompanying a series of photographs, about Guam. Featured at the top of the piece was a photo of the Camacho family—representative civilians, just a family of Guam residents out for the night—contemplating dinner menus at the Applebee’s in the village of Tamuning. What justified publishing this glimpse into a franchise casual dining restaurant in an unincorporated US territory half the globe away from the mainland was an escalating exchange between North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un and his United States counterpart, Donald Trump. Each leader threatened the other with the use of nuclear weapons, what Kim Jong-un had described as “an enveloping fire” and Trump had ratcheted up to “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”1 Guam, as the piece of the United States of America geographically closest to North Korea, and as, moreo

Sobre la victoria de Petro hablamos con Silvia Otero de la Universidad del Rosario en Bogotá. De los retos para Macron, con Gaspard Estrada de Science Po. Y de Andalucía, con Fernando Álvarez-Ossorio de la Universidad de Sevilla

In Russia, an estimated 11 million people have relatives in Ukraine. With so many family ties connecting the two countries, why haven’t more Russians risen up against Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine? According to recent news stories, the answer partly is that many Russians believe President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda narratives over their own kin’s firsthand accounts. Are these headline-grabbing accounts isolated incidents, or do they represent broader trends? Are Russian and Ukrainian relatives still communicating? If so, have some Ukrainians pierced the veil of Russian propaganda, at least with their family members?

Gustavo Petro recibió más de 11 millones de votos y a Rodolfo Hernández no le alcanzó. Aunque el domingo 29 de mayo varios analistas se apresuraron a concluir que Petro había perdido (otra vez) la oportunidad de ser elegido presidente, el rápido crecimiento de Hernández en la primera vuelta no sobrevivió al escrutinio del tiempo.

Conspiratorial beliefs can endanger individuals and societies by increasing the likelihood of harmful behaviors such as political violence and the flouting of public health guidelines. While scholars have identified various correlates of conspiracy beliefs, one factor that has received scant attention is depressive symptoms. Depressive symptoms may be associated with a loss of control that conspiracy beliefs can counter by providing an antidote to uncertainty and distress. This relationship between depression and conspiratorial thinking, however, likely depends on other individual and situational factors. The researchers use three large surveys to document the connection between depression and conspiracy beliefs. While a relationship consistently exists, its extent depends on other factors: Variables that lead to an additional loss of control (e.g., illness) strengthen the ...

“The idea that it is a ‘religious’ issue is relatively new. Some trace it to the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and ’80s. But concern and fear about women’s autonomy and its societal and even biological consequences can be traced back much further in American history, as Marie Griffiths shows in her book “Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics.” Griffiths tracks these concerns to the rise of the anti-suffrage movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The bottom line is that these are both secular and religious questions. The idea that it is either/or is a distraction.”

Political science Prof. Daniel Galvin, who specializes in worker’s rights and labor politics, said the unionization process is “littered with obstacles” and “favors the employer at every turn.” About 90% of workers do not have collective bargaining abilities, Galvin said, preventing employee negotiations. “Low-wage workers are probably the ones who are most in need of rights and protections,” Galvin said. “They’re the ones who have turned to these small community-based organizations to recreate the kind of substantive rights that you might have otherwise gotten through collective bargaining agreements.”

Pase lo que pase el domingo, el establecimiento político colombiano ya perdió. Rodolfo Hernández, como otros populistas en los países andinos, ha demostrado que se puede llegar lejos sin su apoyo, sin sus recursos y sin partido político. Si se puede gobernar sin ellos, es otra pregunta que aún queda por resolver.

Allport’s Theory of Interpersonal Contact suggests that coming into contact with a member of an outgroup should increase support for that outgroup. Previous studies find mixed results when applying Allport’s theory to reported contact with transgender people. We posit that this is due to imprecise and aggregated measures of contact and a lack of attention to the differences between contact that is ephemeral or ongoing and voluntary or obligatory. We explore our theories with data from a large, high-quality survey conducted in early 2020. We find that while various forms of contact (including voluntary and obligatory) predict warmer ratings on feeling thermometers, only close personal friendships—contact that is voluntary and ongoing—predicts attitudes toward transgender-inclusive policies.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riots opened with a highly orchestrated, prime-time event on Thursday that was watched by 20 million viewers, but history has shown that some of the most memorable hearings don't always produce lasting results. While congressional hearings have led to watershed moments in U.S. history, these hearings will address new subject matter for the nation, including accusations that a defeated president orchestrated an attack on the Capitol to overturn election results.

For some years we have been hearing criticism that the left has been left alone with “ identity ” issues and has abandoned the “ universalist ” flags of the 20th century. This is not the exclusive heritage of Chile, the same claims are heard in all the countries of the region, in the United States and in several European countries. According to those who are nostalgic for “universalist” politics, when the left stopped talking to the workers and began to deal with feminist , environmentalist, sexual dissidence , indigenous people demands, that is, “post-material identity” demands, it lost north and the possibility of speaking for the needs of the whole world.

Despite its progressive constitution, gender-based violence remains a pervasive problem in post-apartheid South Africa. In this poignantly written book, Hannah Britton provides a powerful intersectional framework to account for this troubling reality. Fundamentally, her research holds that the carceral approach to addressing gender-based violence—with its focus on criminalizing and incarcerating perpetrators—has proved to be inadequate because it has helped the state eschew accountability for protecting all citizens. Shifting attention away from individual-level solutions, Ending Gender-Based Violence develops a novel community-level analysis. This analysis helps explain both the endurance of violence against women in the post-apartheid era and offers solutions to address the root causes of such violence.

The up-close view of the Syrian case suggests, as Justin Schon surmises, the enormous difficulty of sustaining a broad coalitional challenge to a regime that rules through a patchwork of alliances and instrumentalizes ethnic identity. My book dwells on pre-uprising techniques of governance because decisions taken in the moment of contention are so often heavily constrained by the networks and resources available to incumbents ruling in this manner. The question of uniting diverse segments of the population also hangs over attempts to build new governance arrangements out of the wreckage of civil wars in these polities; the hope is that understanding the historical exigencies that sustained such patchworks before revolution, as well as the processes that undid them, will contribute to building more equitable and durable arrangements for the future. However, the trajectory of the ...

In Surviving the War in Syria, Justin Schon examines the ways that civilians safeguard themselves and aid others during civil wars. Focusing on the ongoing civil war in Syria, the book discusses a wide range of “survival strategies” that civilians undertake and examines empirical variation in two of them: the timing of civilian migration outside the country and the extent to which civilians provide “community support”, material or emotional assistance to other civilians. The book proceeds from the astute observation that there is no direct, mechanical relationship between the level of violence an individual witnesses or is subjected to and that individual’s propensity to migrate or provide aid—instead, a host of structural and situational factors mediate these outcomes. To explain this variation, Schon introduces both “motivation” and “opportunity” factors, operating at the societal ...

After nearly a year of investigating the Jan. 6 attack, the House select committee will Prime-time hearings of the Jan. 6 committee begin Thursday night. Reset checks in with experts to discuss what to expect and where we go from here.

“The primetime hearing scheduled by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is likely to break new ground in terms of what we know about the high-level planning and execution of the Republican Party’s attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election. “Given what we know from press reports, it will likely cast light on the role that several high-ranking members of Congress played in the events and give us some insight into precisely what Donald Trump was doing in the White House as the insurrection unfolded. There is no doubt that the hearings will scandalize the nation. The problem is that the hearings on their own will not save our Democracy. Not only have the GOP embarked on a dangerous path of denying that the insurrection ever happened, but they are continuing to plot and organize to steal subsequent elections."

En las elecciones de 2022 la escisión maestra de la política colombiana cambió. En vez de dividirnos frente a qué hacer con el conflicto, el país se dividió alrededor de tres ejes: petrismo vs. anti-petrismo, uribismo vs. anti-uribismo, y establecimiento vs. anti-establecimiento. Los candidatos escogieron distintas esquinas en ese cubo imaginario que combina los tres ejes para construir su base electoral fuerte. Petro obtiene la mayoría de sus votos de la esquina del anti-establecimiento-antiuribismo-petrismo y Rodolfo Hernández tiene su base de votantes en la esquina anti-establecimiento-antiuribista-anti petrista.

Afro-Latinos are the most vulnerable to discrimination, but their official invisibility makes them harder to serve.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit globally, Otros Cruces began a virtual training program studying two books on secularism and religious freedom written by the outstanding scholar Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a Professor at Northwestern University. We interviewed her, and she shared with us her main contributions in the disciplines of political science, religious studies, and the social sciences based on her research on global religion and politics.This booklet consists of the transcription and translation into Spanish of the interview conducted in English. It is a valuable work because, on the one hand, it is a pioneering unpublished work of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd in Spanish. In addition, we expect that this book will be the first of a series of writings delving into her contributions. On the other hand, this book represents the beginning of a dialogue about the problematics of religion and pol

The panel is also recommending programs to get Black people registered to vote and keep them on the voter rolls; programs to repay Black land and business owners for value lost in racial terror; programs to get students free tuition; and programs to house vulnerable populations. Plus, the panel wants lawmakers to allow incarcerated people to vote, make mental health care and rehabilitation a first priority for inmates and pay them for their work while in prison.

"The International Religious Freedom Act, passed by Congress in 1998, set international religious freedom promotion (IRF) as a core objective of American foreign policy. Although formally empowering the president to enact punitive sanctions in instances of extreme religious repression, IRF is primarily a soft power instrument, with the expressed intent to persuade rather than coerce states into greater respect for religious freedom. Nearly a quarter century since its enactment, however, religious discrimination has markedly increased worldwide. This paper therefore seeks to quantitatively evaluate the extent to which American soft power, measured via levels of popular approval for the United States in countries surveyed by various polling agencies from 2002 to 2014, has correlated with shifts in governmental religious discrimination (GRD) since 1998. We find that not only do higher level

"The recent first-round elections held on Sunday, May 29, brought several surprises. In this text we analyze some trends based on the municipal results obtained by the different candidates. The conclusion is that the election is tight and that both campaigns must establish differentiated strategies for each territory if they want to win."

Recent events have augured a renewed urgency among political scientists to address the instability of democracy and the structure of racism in the United States. In this article, I make the case for American political development (APD) scholars to engage more deeply with Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois's masterful study of political development during the Reconstruction Era. This rich text, which analyzes an often overlooked period in the APD literature, offers numerous contributions that can reinvigorate our analyses of democracy and racism in the United States.

Theories of social norms suggest that, except for prejudiced people, individuals should reject racially derogatory speech. The increase of derogation in politics, including byi ngroup members, suggests more complexity. We argue that source cues shape the application of norms. Specifically, group membership of the observer and that of the speaker are critical to understanding how norms manifest in politics. We test this theory in four experimental studies that compare the reactions of White and Black respondents to White, Black, and Muslim candidates. We find that both Black andWhite Americans punish White candidates who derogate Blacks or Muslims."

It’s also a reminder of how little has changed since then to enact meaningful gun control legislation. In fact, if anything, gun laws around the country have become radically more permissive: Since 2020, 24 states have passed extreme permitless carry laws, with more likely to follow, despite strong resistance from law enforcement, the public, and gun safety advocates — and despite research suggesting that more permissive laws lead to more gun violence.

From Colonial to Multilateral International Law: A Global Capitalism and Law Investigation employed a very unusual research strategy.1 I drew on the global histories of others to explore the interaction between the shift from a colonial to multilateral system of international lawmaking and the practices of global firms, seeking to identify how the operation of global capitalism has shaped international law during and across the colonial and multilateral eras. Instead of accepting the idea that international law consists of agreements between states, and that the world of law is divided between international and domestic law, I explored histories of law in colonial times, and the practices that firms have used to legally defend their operations in different parts of the world. Following John Ruggie, I defined principled multilateralism as a twentieth-century mode of international politics

"Justice and equity are fundamental to the complex choices that societies need to make to achieve transformative change (Bennett et al., 2019; IPBES, 2019; Leach et al., 2018; Martin, 2017). Evidence that more socioeconomically unequal societies tend to experience higher rates of biodiversity loss (Holland et al., 2009; IPBES, 2019) suggests that injustice and threats to biodiversity are closely intertwined. Injustice can function as an underlying cause of biodiversity loss, such as where colonial expropriation of Indigenous peoples’ land paves the way for its exploitation (Martinez-Alier, 2002)."

Algorithms are the computational rules behind technologies like GPS navigation, online search, and content streaming. Previously, algorithms were designed by programmers who defined their rulesets. Today, machine learning also makes it possible for algorithms, immersed in large datasets, to develop their own rules. Machine learning may be supervised by training algorithms or left unsupervised to operate with fewer cues. For instance, a handwriting-detection algorithm may learn by being trained on a database of pre-labeled handwritten images or through immersion in a database where the algorithm clusters images based on its own pattern identification.

“Tomorrow’s primary contest in Georgia will be yet another test of former President Donald Trump’s power to shape the fortunes of Republican candidates in the current cycle. Mr. Trump has had a mixed record in the current cycle. His endorsement of J.D. Vance in the Ohio Senate primary is his big win thus far. In other states, however, Mr. Trump’s endorsement has proven to be far less powerful than anyone would have predicted going into the cycle."

A study by researchers at Northwestern University, released in September 2020, found that individuals who received their news from social media were more likely to believe in misinformation about coronavirus conspiracies and risk factors.

The past decade has seen a dramatic rise in the public profile of white nationalism in the United States. Invigorated by the 2008 election of President Barack Obama and coalescing with the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, this period was marked by a substantial uptick in far-right hate crimes, white nationalist rallies, marches, protests, and online activities, and increasing polarization of the voting public, marked particularly by white resentment regarding perceived status decline. While these phenomena are closely correlated, white nationalist groups (WNGs) are typically regarded as symptoms of such resentments rather than social movements that may contribute to tangible political outcomes.

Using an original survey experiment, this paper explores voter preference formation on competing dimensions of educational equality. In March 2012, residents of Evanston, IL voted on a ballot referendum that would levy taxes earmarked for building a new school in a historically Black neighborhood that has not had a neighborhood school since racial integration of the school district in the late 1960s. Competing visions of equality as either integration or community control were at the heart of the Evanston referendum debate; maintaining city-wide racial integration of all schools was pitted against providing equal access for all to a local school in their own neighborhood. This paper specifically focuses on how white voters, who often hold undue influence in education policy-making, form their preferences on an issue that has a significant racial impact. I find that priming and ...

Interpreting Nietzsche’s writings on agency and responsibility through the lens of non-sovereignty generates interpretive and political-theoretical contributions. More specifically, I advance three arguments.

Karl Rove argued that Trump’s influence was limited, noting that almost 68 percent of Ohio's Republican voters “ignored or rejected” Trump’s endorsement by voting for other candidates. But totaling the votes for MAGA-style candidates — Vance, Josh Mandel and Mike Gibbons — shows that the Trump brand is tops in the Ohio GOP. Together, Vance and Mandel, the second-place finisher, combined for 56 percent of Republican voters. Add the 12 percent of voters who picked Gibbons, and two-thirds of all Republican primary voters pulled levers for MAGA.

It is "the classic example of essentially trying to buy a better reputation ... to distract from the fact that you're still very much tied to an authoritarian regime," said Jordan Gans-Morse, professor of corruption in the post-Soviet era at Northwestern University.

Danmark har i de seneste måneder taget betydelige skridt for at hjælpe Ukraine med at forsvare sig selv over for Rusland. Først besluttede den danske regering at sende 2.700 antitank-missiler til det ukrainske militær. For nylig meddelte regeringen så, at Danmark vil øge våbenhjælpen til Ukraine med 600 millioner kroner samt forskellige former for pansrede mandskabsvogne.

Many Americans agree that incivility in politics is a problem and has been one for a long time (Herbst Reference Herbst2010). Many speak of incivility as a singular concept; that is, a set of words and phrases that apparently “everyone” knows have no place in good democratic governance. Recent work has found systematic variation in what people perceive as uncivil. I argue that these variations stem not only from partisan reasoning but perhaps more importantly from stereotypes about race and gender, indicating that incivility itself is an identity-laden construct for most Americans.

What is happening in Ukraine? Associate Professor of Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at Northwestern University Jordan Gans-Morse recaps the latest with Steve Cochran and Judy Pielach. To hear the full interview, head to the WLS AM Highlights Page!

Images of plastic bags in the bellies of marine animals and ominously growing floating islands of garbage in the ocean offer a compelling narrative to ban plastic in favor of more environmentally friendly materials. However, this tells only a partial story.

A more simple explanation for the downtrend, according to Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University professor who specializes in crime issues: The weather has been unseasonably crummy this year.

Porque es muy probable que a la segunda vuelta de las presidenciales de este año llegue Gustavo Petro a enfrentarse con el candidato de la derecha, Federico Gutiérrez, muchos han visto en esta elección una proyección de lo que el país vivió hace cuatro años. En ese entonces, Petro fue derrotado por el hasta entonces desconocido Iván Duque, quien ganó en gran parte por ser la antítesis del candidato de izquierda. ¿Pero qué tanto pueden pensarse las presidenciales de 2022 como un 2018 recargado?

As we celebrate Mother’s Day, it’s worth noting the challenges that motherhood brings. Many mothers are struggling to make parenting decisions amid changing coronavirus protocols, such as assessing travel risks after a Florida federal judge struck down the mask mandate for planes and other transportation. In the United States, many mothers are fearful of the continued threat to reproductive rights for themselves and their children, given the recently leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion on abortion.

This article looks at two case studies of unsettling settler-colonialism in the far north of California: the inclusion of Yurok language electives in public high school, and land return to the Wiyot Tribe. These two cases demonstrate repertoires of Indigenous resistance to historic and ongoing culturecide—the killing of culture—and show what unsettling settler-colonialism looks like in the region. I argue that each of these two events—acts of Indigenous voice-raising and place-making— constitute forms of resistance to ongoing erasure of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonized spaces. Concretely, both Yurok language course inclusion in public schools, and land return of Duluwat Island to the Wiyot Tribe disrupt patterns of culturecide and promote new kinds of settler-Indigenous relations in the region.

Scientists in the United States have made transformative discoveries that have improved societal well-being. Yet the United States also has a long, unsettling history of unequal access to these advances. This unequal access exacerbates disparate impacts of science-related phenomena, such as climate change and COVID-19, on vulnerable populations. In part, these problems are intensified by the fact that retrospective research that documents inequities is far more prevalent than prospective research that studies differences among groups.

On the other hand, people do not simply believe whatever they wish to believe. On most scientific topics, public beliefs reflect the best available science and are not significantly polarized (Kahan 2015; McPhetres, Bago, and Pennycook 2019). Furthermore, the public has largely maintained a high level of confidence in the scientific community over time (Druckman, this volume). Therefore, the phenomena just described are not universal, and understanding the factors and conditions that aggravate them is a key step in assessing the corresponding threat to science.

The scientific enterprise leads a precarious existence. It produces systematized knowledge that constitutes an unrivaled information source on which to base decisions. Yet science also incentivizes criticism, cannot provide definitive proof, and is practiced by a relatively small, homogenous group of experts. These latter features make science vulnerable to threats that undermine its usefulness. These threats include the misappropriation of science for reasons orthogonal to the creation of knowledge (specifically, political motivations), misinformation where inaccurate claims appear in the guise of science, and inequalities of representation in the scientific enterprise that can lead to flawed epistemology and group disenfranchisement.

Despite decades of climate science research, existing climate actions have had limited impacts on mitigating climate change. Efforts to reduce emissions, for example, have yet to spur sufficient action to reduce the most severe effects of climate change. We draw from our experiences as Ojibwe knowledge holders and community members, scientists, and scholars to demonstrate how the lack of recognition of traditional knowledges (TK) within climate science constrains effective climate action and exacerbates climate injustice.

According to a leaked draft opinion obtained by Politico, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Northwestern University has four political and legal experts available to discuss the historical and legal context of the potential decision and what it would mean for the future of abortion rights and the Court’s interpretation of the protections guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Though Africa historically has been the site of countless military coups d’état, civil-military relations across the continent have changed dramatically in recent years. What do these changes say about the military's ongoing role in Africa's political and social institutions? How useful are conventional models for understanding civil-military relations in the African context? The authors of Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in Africa address these questions, exploring the nature and significance of evolving relationships between political authority, military power, and society.

According to Alvin Tillery, Jr., the founding director of Northwestern University’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy (CSDD), “diversity” has become increasingly complex, nuanced, broader, and more contested.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kremlin officials have increasingly made threatening statements to NATO as a strategic tactic as the Ukraine war enters its third month, according to experts.

Much of the legal debate over the use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) focuses on whether AWS are capable of respecting basic principles of international humanitarian law (IHL). In one camp are the “techno-pessimists”: scholars who insist that AWS are not and never will be capable of complying with IHL. In the other camp are the “techno-optimists”: scholars who believe not only that AWS will eventually be able to comply with IHL, but also that the use of AWS can make armed conflict less violent.

A little-known aspect of the war in Ukraine is that both Russia and Ukraine have deployed weapons that are capable of being used fully autonomously: for Russia, Lancet drones; for Ukraine, Punisher drones. Both weapons are capable of being operated semi-autonomously, and it is not clear whether Russia or Ukraine has used them in their fully autonomous mode. But the mere possibility indicates that, like it or not, we are drawing inexorably closer to the day when autonomous weapons systems (AWS) are regular participants in armed conflict.

With global attention focused on the plight of people fleeing Ukraine, the U.K. government has announced a new pay-for-processing program with Rwanda. The policy would further close already heavily restricted U.K. borders by allowing British officials to target people arriving via the English Channel and send some of them 4,000 miles away. It is a response to ongoing debates in a post-Brexit context about how to stem arrivals to British shores — and, ultimately, how to limit who obtains asylum in the United Kingdom.

Why did Bucaramanga go from being the great example of success in reducing inequality to having an alarming setback? In the research on Unequal Cities that I lead from the Universidad del Rosario, we have found that the main reason for the success of the beautiful city until 2016 was the labor income that grew at very fast rates for the poorest in the city. But in recent years the incomes of the poor and middle class have begun to decline, while the earnings of the richest 10% have begun to recover. These changes in the behavior of labor income were the main cause of the evolution of income inequality in the city, since other types of income, such as aid from remittances or subsidies, have been very marginal in the city.

When individuals evaluate policies, they consider both the policy’s content and its endorsers. In this study, we investigate the conditions under which these sometimes competing factors guide preferences. In an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19, American President Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau bilaterally agreed to close their shared border to refugee claimants and asylum seekers. These ideologically opposed leaders endorsing a common policy allows us to test the influence of a well-known foreign neighbor on domestic policy evaluations. With a large cross-national survey experiment, we first find that Canadians and Americans follow ideological positions in evaluating the policy, with right-leaning respondents offering the most support.

Weinberg junior Jason Hegelmeyer and SESP sophomore Donovan Cusick have won the Associated Student Government presidential election with over 70% of the vote. The slate won 1,385 of the 1,950 total votes cast. Hegelmeyer and Cusick’s opponents raked in 529 votes, while 36 students submitted a vote of no confidence, according to Election Commission Chair Jo Scaletty. The number of votes cast increased from last year’s 1,353 total votes, is down from 2,064 in 2020 and higher than the 852 in the uncontested 2019 election.

Northwestern University junior Ji Hye Choi has received a highly competitive 2022 Harry S. Truman Scholarship, a $30,000 award that supports graduate education for outstanding students who demonstrate leadership potential and plan to pursue a career in public service. Choi is a pre-law student and aspiring wrongful convictions attorney majoring in political science and minoring in Asian American studies — with a certificate in civic engagement — in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Studies of refugee belonging, as a key facet of integration, primarily focus on post-flight processes. Adopting an approach to integration that is temporally and spatially broader, this article argues that refugees’ varied experiences of belonging or estrangement in origin countries fundamentally condition their subsequent experiences of belonging or estrangement in settlement countries.

“The confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court is a watershed moment in our nation’s history,” Tillery said. “It is also a major win for President Biden, who has now kept a campaign promise to a crucial Democratic constituency and expanded the diversity of the Supreme Court. While it is understandable why the majority of Americans who wanted Judge Jackson confirmed to the Supreme Court might see her elevation as a sign that the country is finally moving past the polarization that characterized the Trump years, this would be a mistake.

Foreign Policy’s second annual Climate Summit returns against the backdrop of Earth Day for another year of high-impact programming dedicated to advancing scalable and inclusive strategies to combat climate change. With an eye toward identifying the solutions and partnerships that can drive deep decarbonization and sustainable development, this two-day summit will explore issues ranging from clean energy supply chains to finance for clean technology deployment to cleaner consumption.

For this article, EVIC team member Jacob Bendicksen and I spoke to three early career election scholars: Joseph Anthony, teaching assistant professor of American politics at Oklahoma State University (who announced this week he will be joining SUNY-Cortland in the fall as an assistant professor of political science); Lia Merivaki, assistant professor of American politics at Mississippi State University and a member of the Carter Center’s U.S. Elections Expert Study Team; and Mara Suttmann-Lea, assistant professor of American politics at Connecticut College and host of What Voting Means to Me, a podcast about democracy – the latest episode of which dropped yesterday and features New York’s Dustin Czarny.

At Northwestern’s virtual Commencement last June, Nolan Robinson opened his student address with a poem (above) that captured the essence of his Northwestern experience. “That entire speech really is a reflection of everything that has happened to me here, with the lessons I learned about knowing that I’m enough, that I don’t need to prove anything to anyone, that I belong here, that I’m worthy and that my voice is powerful,” says Robinson ’21.

La discusión sobre el trabajo de la Convención Constitucional ha tomado un nuevo tono. Hay más intensidad en el debate y las encuestas muestran que las opciones del apruebo y del rechazo estarían con empate técnico.

For summer 2022, the American Research Institute in Turkey will offer fellowships for advanced participants in the summer program in intensive advanced Turkish language at Bogaziçi University* in Istanbul. This is a unique opportunity for intensive and immersive study of advanced Turkish language.

This is the tenth episode in the Religion in Praxis Conversations Series (previously known simply as "the Conversations Series") and today's speaker is Elizabeth Shakman Hurd. While offering important perspectives on the myriad evidentiary assessment challenges facing adjudicators, the legal and social scientific literature bypasses the political theological questions that interest me here. What are the theological and political conditions that sustain practices of political and religious asylum seeking despite the persistent limitations and limits surrounding legal adjudication involving religion? Given the instability of the category of religion, why do the authorities persist in trying to establish whether a person, action, belief, or practice is credibly subject to religious persecution? How might we understand religion anew in this context?

We know that it’s fundamentally aimed at maintaining international peace, security, and cooperation. But what does it actually do? What would a world without the UN look like? And how did it come about? Rod Quinn spoke to Ian Hurd, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University; and author of After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the UN Security Council, and How to Do Things with International Law.

The Rapoport Doctoral Dissertation Grants are available to all US-based graduate students who are at the point of initiating or are already conducting dissertation research focused on advancing knowledge and understanding of political behavior.

The story of the legal and policy transformations of the “Second Reconstruction” often focuses on dramatic events in legislatures, courts, and protests. In The Civil Rights Lobby, Shamira Gelbman shifts our attention to an understudied group of actors: the lobbyists who connected advocacy organizations to policymakers in Washington. The book examines the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the most prominent civil rights-focused interest group coalition in national politics, from its early status as a “permanent ad hoc committee” in the 1950s to its central coordinating role in the lobbying campaign for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Gelbman traces these developments through a close analysis of the LCCR’s archives, supplemented by records of member organizations and leaders and interviews with two participants in the coalition’s 1960s lobbying campaigns.

The “rule of law” (ROL) is invoked by multinational institutions, Western governments and in China as a political expectation of what legitimate governance looks like. Chinese leaders regularly make claims that are translated into commitments to uphold the ROL, and they generalize this rhetoric to the international level. This chapter, written for a forthcoming handbook on China and international law, compares different understandings of the rule of law in the West and in China. The question we ask is whether Chinese and Western leaders, practitioners and scholars mean fundamentally different things when they speak of the ‘rule of law’ as an ideal to aspire.

On February 8, 2022, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi decreed his appointment of Judge Boulos Fahmy Eskandar to lead the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC). As the first-ever Coptic Christian to serve in this capacity, does the appointment bode well for the rule of law and the status of Copts?

The question of whether Western nations should provide more meaningful military support to Ukraine dominated NATO’s recent summit. The operating logic here, at least the one most prevalent in Western media, is that Ukraine, too weak to withstand Russia’s massed forces, owes its very existence to the U.S. and its NATO allies. In fact, we owe more to the Ukrainians who are resisting Vladimir Putin than they do to us. The West has been far too complacent toward the threats of expansionist authoritarianism in Europe and East Asia and the rise of illiberal values in our own midst. Thanks to Ukrainians’ brave resistance and Putin’s brutal repression of freedom in Russia and Ukraine, we have begun to awaken to these threats to our fundamental values and institutions.

"Last night, 'Encanto' won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The movie has generated buzz beyond the screens. Psychologists are talking about how it depicts generational trauma. Others are discussing how accurately it portrays Colombia. But surprisingly less attention has been given to what seems to be the key message of the movie: people do not need to be special to deserve love, security, and ultimately, rights. Through song, 'Encanto' quietly teaches a powerful lesson about the flaws of U.S. immigration policy."

Calculations of the electoral effects of incorporating new voters and beliefs on how inclusion alters gender hierarchies constitute two central motivations of decision makers when facing the prospect of suffrage reform. In contrast to the dominant electoral approach, by focusing on the case of early (before World War II) women’s suffrage in Latin America, I show that both these motivations are necessary and need to align for reform to occur. To explain the (mis)alignment of electoral calculations and social order concerns in Latin America, I consider the region’s historical oligarchic–anti-oligarchic cleavage structure, which is rooted in overlapping class and religious divisions.

Despite these limitations, branding Putin a “war criminal” in the legal sense could still have consequences, particularly in the (unlikely) scenario where Putin loses power and wants to flee the country. As political scientists Alexander Downes and Daniel Krcmaric noted in the Washington Post last week, “there is little chance that the sitting leader of a major nuclear power will be hauled in front of the ICC. But the ICC investigation and Biden’s ‘war criminal’ label mean that a foreign retirement — or even foreign travel — is probably off the table.”

"When Trump muddies the water by praising Putin, or undermines Zelensky and spreads falsehoods about Ukraine, this has real implications for how this crisis plays out," said Jordan Gans-Morse, a Northwestern University professor who was a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine. "It shapes public opinion in ways that tie Biden's hands when he's a de facto wartime president."

This Friday marked one month since Russia invaded Ukraine. Northwestern Buffett hosted a virtual panel discussion in partnership with Northwestern Weinberg's Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies (REEES) Program joined by scholars on the ground in Ukraine, regional experts, and leaders in international law, humanitarian medicine, media studies, diplomacy and military strategy discuss how sanctions have influenced the Russian public’s view of the war, the humanitarian response to the war so far, what universities can do to support Ukrainian scholars and students and more.

Gun ownership is a highly a consequential political behavior. It often signifies a belief about the inadequacy of state-provided security and leads to membership in a powerful political constituency (which is commonly mobilized by the National Rifle Association). As such, understanding why people purchase guns and how doing so affects the composition of gun owners is important, as it can have palpable political consequences. The researchers address these issues by exploring the dynamics of one of the largest gun-buying spikes in American history, which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gun ownership is a highly a consequential political behavior. It often signifies a belief about the inadequacy of state-provided security and leads to membership in a powerful political constituency (which is commonly mobilized by the National Rifle Association). As such, understanding why people purchase guns and how doing so affects the composition of gun owners is important, as it can have palpable political consequences. The researchers address these issues by exploring the dynamics of one of the largest gun-buying spikes in American history, which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. They show that feelings of diffuse threat prompted many to buy guns.

Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine has many crying for justice. In the month since Russia’s invasion, the wheels of international justice are already turning. In early March, the International Criminal Court launched an investigation into possible Russian war crimes in Ukraine. And last week, the United States entered the fray when President Biden labeled Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.” It is hard to disagree with Biden’s assessment. Putin’s forces have committed horrific abuses during their attack on Ukraine. In the city of Mariupol alone, Russia bombed a maternity hospital and a theater where more than 1,000 civilians were sheltering. For these crimes — and many others — Putin certainly deserves to face justice.

Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine has many crying for justice. In the month since Russia’s invasion, the wheels of international justice are already turning. In early March, the International Criminal Court launched an investigation into possible Russian war crimes in Ukraine. And last week, the United States entered the fray when President Biden labeled Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.” It is hard to disagree with Biden’s assessment. Putin’s forces have committed horrific abuses during their attack on Ukraine. In the city of Mariupol alone, Russia bombed a maternity hospital and a theater where more than 1,000 civilians were sheltering. For these crimes — and many others — Putin certainly deserves to face justice.

Firearm ownership has been recognized as a major risk factor for suicide attempt and suicide death for at least 3 decades. Rates of handgun ownership were strongly associated with suicide rates, and the trends in each of these rates were shown to be associated over time. Most notably, a study of California residents found hazard of suicide to be 3 times greater among men and 7 times greater among women if they owned a firearm. With the increase in firearm purchases observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential effect of this risk factor has only increased.

Firearm ownership has been recognized as a major risk factor for suicide attempt and suicide death for at least 3 decades.1 Rates of handgun ownership were strongly associated with suicide rates,2 and the trends in each of these rates were shown to be associated over time.3 Most notably, a study of California residents found hazard of suicide to be 3 times greater among men and 7 times greater among women if they owned a firearm.4 With the increase in firearm purchases observed during the COVID-19 pandemic,5 the potential effect of this risk factor has only increased.

For Oberlin track and field standout Monique Newton, a defining moment of her college experience came away from the track: the 2014 killing of Tamir Rice by Cleveland police. "All I knew at the time was that a 12-year-old Black child, the same age as my cousin, Amani, back home, had been killed," said Newton, who was a freshman at the time of the killing. Rice's death ignited her passion in Black political organizing and protest. A first-generation college student unsure of her future, Newton originally thought she would study computer science when she arrived on campus in Ohio from Sacramento, California. She left Oberlin as a two-time track and field national champion and eight-time All-American with majors in politics and law and society, a minor in Africana studies and an invigorated sense of purpose.

Story Links For Oberlin track and field standout Monique Newton, a defining moment of her college experience came away from the track: the 2014 killing of Tamir Rice by Cleveland police. "All I knew at the time was that a 12-year-old Black child, the same age as my cousin, Amani, back home, had been killed," said Newton, who was a freshman at the time of the killing. Rice's death ignited her passion in Black political organizing and protest. A first-generation college student unsure of her future, Newton originally thought she would study computer science when she arrived on campus in Ohio from Sacramento, California. She left Oberlin as a two-time track and field national champion and eight-time All-American with majors in politics and law and society, a minor in Africana studies and an invigorated sense of purpose.

This article explores the likelihood that officer-involved killings affect protest. Analyzing respondents to the Collaborative Multiracial Political Survey (CMPS) reveals no increases in protest activity between treatment groups exposed to officer-involved killings in their local area prior to participating in the survey and control groups who were exposed to officer-involved killings after survey participation overall. In fact, local exposure to Black victims appears to repress protest, but only among young Black respondents. This effect depends on the characteristics of the victim and the incident, as killings of low threat Black victims do not seem to repress protest.

With the designation of temporary protected status, or TPS, to Ukrainians by the Biden administration, familiar debates about the ethical responsibilities of the U.S. in the face of war resurfaced. On one side, activists and a bipartisan coalition argued that it would be morally untenable to send innocent people back to a war-riven country. On the other side, conservatives warned that this designation would open the way to potentially endless renewals, allowing Ukrainians to stay in the country for an unlimited amount of time. But both sides miss the bigger question of whether TPS is an adequate legal mechanism of protection in the first place. And they miss the fact that the U.S. government designed TPS to selectively limit its responsibility toward unprotected populations.

The Program on Negotiation (PON) is a consortium program of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University and serves as an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to developing the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution in a range of public and private settings. PON’s mission includes nurturing the next generation of negotiation teachers and scholars, helping students become more effective negotiators, and providing a forum for the discussion of ideas.

With the designation of temporary protected status, or TPS, to Ukrainians by the Biden administration, familiar debates about the ethical responsibilities of the U.S. in the face of war resurfaced. On one side, activists and a bipartisan coalition argued that it would be morally untenable to send innocent people back to a war-riven country. On the other side, conservatives warned that this designation would open the way to potentially endless renewals, allowing Ukrainians to stay in the country for an unlimited amount of time. But both sides miss the bigger question of whether TPS is an adequate legal mechanism of protection in the first place.

The Program on Negotiation (PON) is a consortium program of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University and serves as an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to developing the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution in a range of public and private settings. PON’s mission includes nurturing the next generation of negotiation teachers and scholars, helping students become more effective negotiators, and providing a forum for the discussion of ideas.

The U.S., its NATO allies and the G7 nations continue to work to hold Putin accountable for his aggression against Ukraine. Northwestern University political scientist William Reno, an expert on the politics of violent conflict and the political effects of foreign military assistance is available to discuss avenues available for providing aid to Ukraine, and what needs to be off the table to avoid escalation of conflict between the nuclear-armed powers of the U.S. and Russia.

Grants or matching funds are available to one or more continuing faculty members or departments for projects that enhance undergraduate curricular innovation and development. Grants to individual faculty members generally range from $500 to $5,000, although groups and programs/departments may apply for larger grants.

The U.S., its NATO allies and the G7 nations continue to work to hold Putin accountable for his aggression against Ukraine. Northwestern University political scientist William Reno, an expert on the politics of violent conflict and the political effects of foreign military assistance is available to discuss avenues available for providing aid to Ukraine, and what needs to be off the table to avoid escalation of conflict between the nuclear-armed powers of the U.S. and Russia.

The use of the word ‘Oligarch’ has been increasingly rampant across international news outlets since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just weeks ago. But what does it actually mean? Jeffrey A. Winters, an American political scientist at Northwestern University who specialises in the study of oligarchy, notes that the common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines them, empowers them and inherently exposes them to threats. While Dan makes his voyage home, Matt Lewis, from the ‘ Gone Medieval ’ podcast, steps in for this timely episode. To try and make sense of this ancient, yet contemporary phenomenon, Jeffrey joins Matt for a discussion of what oligarchy is, historic and contemporary cases and the relationship between oligarchy and democracy.

The use of the word ‘Oligarch’ has been increasingly rampant across international news outlets since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just weeks ago. But what does it actually mean? Jeffrey A. Winters, an American political scientist at Northwestern University who specialises in the study of oligarchy, notes that the common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines them, empowers them and inherently exposes them to threats. While Dan makes his voyage home, Matt Lewis, from the ‘ Gone Medieval ’ podcast, steps in for this timely episode. To try and make sense of this ancient, yet contemporary phenomenon, Jeffrey joins Matt for a discussion of what oligarchy is, historic and contemporary cases and the relationship between oligarchy and democracy.

In late February, Colombia’s highest court ruled that having an abortion would no longer be a criminal offense. Previously, women in Colombia could have abortions only under certain conditions. Women can no longer be imprisoned for medical abortions, and health-care providers cannot legally deny abortions to women who request them or are at least required to refer women to providers who offer them.

Unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia by the U.S. and its allies have been brought against Russian elites.

From Richmond, VA, Dr. Nathan Dial is an Active-Duty Major in the US Air Force. In 2021, Nathan received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University, concentrating on comparative politics and minoring in qualitative and quantitative methods. His dissertation developed a theory on why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pursues out-of-area activities in the 21st Century.

Assistant Professor Swati Srivastava specializes in International Relations and researches global governance, especially how private actors like corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) interact with governments. Her research program asks three interrelated questions: (1) How is private power expressed in global politics? (2) How does global private power interact with public power? (3) How can global private power be held accountable? These questions form the basis of understanding a world where private actors organize violence, regulate markets, and influence rights alongside states.

There is currently no end of the war in sight in Ukraine. Marina E. Henke, Professor of International Relations at the Hertie School and director of the Center for International Security, explains in an interview why she does not believe in a timely compromise solution, why it would be dangerous if NATO intervened directly in the conflict, which Putin says drives and there is therefore only one direction for Russia: ahead.

As Russia lays siege to multiple Ukrainian cities and President Vladimir Putin puts his nuclear deterrent forces on alert, the United States and its NATO allies face the most severe geopolitical crisis of the post-Cold War era. These events should serve as a stark warning: The office of the presidency, with its all but unlimited authority over the decision to employ nuclear weapons, needs to be Trump-proofed well before the 2024 presidential elections.

The ongoing nightmare in Ukraine has never-ending questions and not enough answers. And then there's the big question...what can we do? Mark and Kip Doyle are about to personally distribute supply bags to refugees and you can help the cause! Jordan Gans-Morse teaches political science at Northwestern and knows Russia and Ukraine inside out. Hear it all here on this speical episode of LIVE FROM MY OFFICE.

When faced with co-partisan politicians who disagree publicly, what side do partisan voters take? We draw on social identity theory to develop a theory of partisan leadership cues arguing that leaders have a key role in social groups and because of that centrality, and accounting for affect-based motivation, co-partisan voters resist ingroup dissent. We test this theory with a series of experiments focused on leaders who violate democratic norms and responses from within the party that reflect loyalty or dissent. Our findings show that co-partisan voters are loathe to punish misbehaving leaders, except when their action represents a major threat and the criticism comes from a high ranking party member.

The iconic downtown restaurant Russian Tea Time is facing backlash from callers and social media reviewers mistakenly linking the venue’s name to Moscow’s brutal war against Ukraine, as anti-Russian sentiment rises across the globe. Yet the Chicago restaurant’s owners say the fallout has been particularly hurtful because their business was actually founded by a Ukrainian chef, and many current employees also hail from Ukraine.

Northwestern professor and political scientist Galya Ben-Arieh published a report in Third World Quarterly that investigates why laws prohibiting the assistance of migrants have become more prevalent in countries like Europe and The United States.

The list of sanctions against Russian oligarchs keeps growing. On Thursday, the British government sanctioned seven of them, including Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club — putting an end to his attempt to sell the reigning European champions. Here in the United States, President Joe Biden called out Russia’s oligarchs in his State of the Union speech, and the federal government has established a task force devoted to, in part, enforcing sanctions against them. France recently seized a superyacht of one alleged oligarch, the European Union has been adding names to the list of oligarchs it’s targeting, and Japan recently froze the assets of dozens of Russian officials and oligarchs. But let’s go back to basics. Who are these oligarchs? What are they? And how much power do they actually have?

It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that no one knows what the hell neoliberal means. Plenty of people are quite sure they know what it means. It's just that they can't agree on a common definition. Consider two articles published in two different left-wing magazines.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing fierce resistance from Ukrainians in his quest to "demilitarize" the country but even if Ukraine surrenders to Russia, maintaining control of the country won't be easy. Russia has claimed it has no plans to occupy Ukraine but Putin's comments ahead of the invasion raised significant concerns about his desire to expand Russia's territory. If Ukraine were to fall, rebuilding the country would come at a significant economic price and a hefty investment on Putin's part to squelch the underground resistance.

Además de ser feminista, también la acompaña el hecho de formar parte de un familia migrante, “experiencias vitales que van a ser parte del sello que ella podría tener dentro del rol que va ejercer”, agregó por su parte la profesora del Instituto de Ciencia Política de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), Julieta Suárez-Cao.

After more than a century and 200 failed attempts, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill Monday that makes lynching a federal hate crime. The Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act was introduced by Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush and is expected to be signed by President Biden. Reset learns more about the legislation and what it means for the ongoing fight for racial justice in the U.S. GUESTS: Professor Alvin Tillery, director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy; and associate professor of political science and African American studies Rev. Wheeler Parker, cousin of Emmett Till

Mit den Waffenlieferungen an die Ukraine wolle man Russland abschrecken, sagt Sicherheitsexpertin Prof. Marina Henke. Dadurch erhoffe man, dass sich auf russischer Seite etwas tut.

"Russia’s war against Ukraine continues, but one thing is already clear. Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved — albeit inadvertently — what nobody else could: a revolution in German security and defense policy. In a remarkable session of the Bundestag on Feb. 27, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced measures that many believed impossible only days earlier. These include a $113 billion defense fund to modernize the German military — anchored in Germany’s Basic Law so that it cannot be used for any other purpose in the future — and an increase in annual defense spending to more than 2 percent of gross domestic product."

"Electoral management bodies have a responsibility to ensure voters have equitable access to the election process, starting with providing information to successfully navigate it. In this article, we assess the educative effects of different modes of election official voter education on completing the voter registration process."

"The English East India Company's “company-state” lasted 274 years—longer than most states. This research note uses new archival evidence to study the Company as a catalyst in the development of modern state sovereignty. Drawing on the records of 16,740 managerial and shareholder meetings between 1678 and 1795, I find that as the Company grew through wars, its claim to sovereign authority shifted from a privilege delegated by Crown and Parliament to a self-possessed right."

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Yesterday the ICC (international criminal court) in the Hague announced it would launch an investigation into possible war crimes enacted by Russia against the civilians of Ukraine. Political science, history and law school faculty from Northwestern University discuss how President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine flouts the rules of international law, and what avenues are available in meting out consequences and de-escalating the war.

There were two crowds in front of Saints Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church in Ukrainian Village on a frigid afternoon last week. One was the medieval crowd that’s always there, on the church’s iconic mural—a depiction of the baptism of the Ukrainian people. The other consisted of several hundred live and livid Chicagoans reacting to Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian nation just hours earlier. They waved Ukraine’s yellow-and-blue flag, sang its national anthem, called for sanctions and other help, and listened to supportive words from the likes of Congressman Mike Quigley.

On Monday, February 28th convened a virtual panel discussion on the unfolding Russian invasion of Ukraine, featuring perspectives from faculty experts including NU Political Science Department’s Ian Hurd (Professor of Political Science and Director of the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies) and Jordan Gans-Morse (Associate Professor of Political Science in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences). The discussion was moderated by Northwestern Buffett Executive Director Annelise Riles.

Answering a question about what motivates Vladimir Putin, Jordan Gans-Morse, professor of political science at Northwestern and an expert on the former Soviet Union, said that many factors are at play including the fact that “It’s intolerable to [Putin] to have a democratic nation … right on his border, creating some sort of model that his own people might want to follow.”

"We certainly do see it play out in terms of the politics of refugee reception in the idea of whose burden should it be to take refugees who are from the global South, the Middle East, Africa, versus, you know, who is welcome and who can be brought in here."

Michelle Bueno Vasquez a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University studying political science and transnational Afro-Latino diaspora, said “For some people, that’s a difficult thing to reckon with, that you’re going to introduce that difference and expose yourself to racist harm, subconsciously some folks just don’t want to go there, they would rather not identify as Black.” According to a study by the State University of New York at Albany, Latinos who identify themselves as Black have lower-incomes, higher unemployment rates, higher poverty rates, less education, and fewer opportunities than those who identify themselves as “White” or “other”. Bueno Vasquez said the mobilization of Latino political organizations has encouraged many Afro-Latinos to identify themselves with Latinos instead of their Black roots in order to gain more funding from the government.

With a Russian invasion looming, the Ukrainian ambassador sat across from his Russian counterpart, his first chance to unload the frustrations and anxieties of a nation directly to its aggressor. He opened not with a complaint about shelling or a defense of sovereignty but with a request that the United Nations release the legal memos from 1991 that permitted Russia to take over the Soviet Union’s old seat at the Security Council. The apparently obscure reference, made even more arcane by the fact that everyone knows there are no memos, may have seemed to many observers an odd choice given the stakes of the moment, but it opened a diplomatic front in the war between Russia and Ukraine that may have some sting.

As Russian forces close in on Kyiv, “a new world order” is upon us and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will echo for years to come, according to Jordan Gans-Morse, a Northwestern political scientist and expert on the former Soviet Union. In order to make sense of the developing news, Northwestern Now asked Gans-Morse and several other experts to weigh in. Ian Kelly is the ambassador-in-residence at Northwestern. Karen Alter is the Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations and co-director of the Research Group on Global Capitalism and Law. Ian Hurd is a professor of political science. And, Michael Allen is an associate professor of history.

"Does it look like there could be a war of serious size within Ukraine between an invading Russian army and Ukrainian army? Yes, that looks increasingly likely. Sanctions themselves; they will hurt. But I do not think that they'll have an actual impact on Putin's policy decisions."

The Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy (CSDD) at Northwestern University announced today (Feb. 23) the launch of a business forum that will connect academic researchers with industry leaders to address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues arising in today’s global marketplace.The new CSDD Business Forum aims to provide business leaders with cutting-edge social science research to generate insights they can translate to their own DEI initiatives.

Does it look like there could be a war of serious size within Ukraine between an invading Russian army and Ukrainian army? Yes, that looks increasingly likely. Sanctions themselves; they will hurt. But I do not think that they'll have an actual impact on Putin's policy decisions.

The January 6th, 2025, Project seeks to understand the social, political, psychological, and demographic factors that led to the January 6th, 2021, insurrection and continue to threaten the stability of our democratic system of government. Through our research, teaching, and public engagement, we hope to offer an assessment of the state of our democracy and insight into how to protect and strengthen it, with a special emphasis on how to prepare for the attack on our electoral system that will likely occur on January 6th, 2025.

The start of 2021 was shocking as mobs attacked the U.S. Capitol, the bastion of American democracy, in an attempt to stop the certification of the presidential election. Simultaneously and far from the United States, a less conspicuous onslaught on another bastion of liberal democratic values unfolded when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arbitrarily appointed a hand-picked rector to run Istanbul’s Bogaziçi University.

Dr. Amos Claudius Sawyer, a man whose enviable vantage point at the intersection of various dimensions of Liberian history might be a subject of study for years to come, has died. He was 76. Dr. Sawyer was a Liberian academic, activist and politician. Highlights of his enviable career included service to his country, Liberia, as interim President from 1990 to 1994. Prior to that, he ran for Mayor of Monrovia, the nation’s capital, as an independent candidate. Dr. Sawyer was a founding member of the Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA) and in 1983 founded the Liberian People's Party. As an academic, he worked as a professor of political science at the University of Liberia. In December 1980, he was appointed Dean of the College of Social Sciences and acting director of the University.

The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape — and are shaped by — their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.

Although often argued that religion should significantly influence international conflict, the empirical record is mixed. For every recurrent interreligious conflict, there are numerous examples of sustained interreligious cooperation. Conflict also frequently mars the oft-assumed peaceful relations between shared-religion states. We argue that religion is an important intervening factor in interstate dispute militarization, especially between internally threatened rivals. In mixed-religion dyads, conflict often follows oppression of cross-border coreligionists, whereas in shared-religion dyads, conflict occurs as one side disproportionately increases its official support for that religion. In both instances, dispute militarization is primarily an effort to undercut domestic competitors, whose challenge is augmented by external threats to leaders’ religious legitimacy.

Jeff Colgan of Brown University joins Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast to discuss his new book, Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order. In the book, Colgan offers lessons for leaders and analysts seeking to design new international governing arrangements to manage an array of pressing concerns. (Starts at 0:38). Safa Al-Saeedi of Northwestern University discusses her latest article, “The Arab spring: why did the uprisings miss the monarchies?,“ published in Contemporary Politics. (Starts at 29:13). Bassel Salloukh of the Doha Institute discusses Lebanon’s ongoing political crisis. (Starts at 42:08).

Grading the president on his immigration policies. A Mexican ballet company returns. New songs to spice up your playlist. And a classic Mexican cocktail hits liquor store shelves. CBS 2 Chicago’s Marissa Parra guest hosts.

Active and equitable participation is key to a well-functioning democracy. It’s important to have people from a wide variety of backgrounds run for public office, push for legislation, call for change, and show up at the polls to vote. Yet researchers know remarkably little about how young people come to participate in politics and how institutions — in particular, schools and the civic lessons they offer — shape this behavior across racial and ethnic groups. Matt Nelsen ’12 is working to change that. His research on the socioeconomic factors that shape political involvement in youth has been featured in the Washington Post, and recently won the Best Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association.

Political science professor at Northwestern University Wendy Pearlman, who spoke at Tuesday’s event about her research interviews with Syrian refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, noted the unique nature of the academic event, which she said was more engagement-oriented than she had been used to.

“Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Black History Month, envisioned that a focus on Black history would teach all Americans to ‘aspire to equality and justice’ for everyone in the U.S,” said Alvin Tillery Jr., an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy.

"Emerging from Chicago’s latest winter storm to share some exciting news: this fall I will be joining the Department of Political Science at the University of Miami as a tenure track assistant professor! I’m absolutely thrilled to be joining such a fantastic group of scholars and look forward to teaching Race, Ethnicity, and Politics and Urban Politics on campus in the fall. I am indebted to those who have stood by my side while navigating three incredibly difficult job markets seasons: First and foremost, my committee: Traci Burch, Cathy Cohen, Jamie Druckman, and Reuel Rogers. Thank you for encouraging me to trust my intellectual instincts."

The CSU is thinking about how it wants to do politics in the opposition. One topic: energy policy. The government's foreign policy is endangering Germany's energy supply. According to the CSU, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is needed for this. Not so easy in a situation in which Russian politics is perceived as a threat.

A national poll provides a snapshot into public sentiment about the acceptability of violent protest against federal, state and local government, providing current insights about the state of U.S. democracy and safety of government officials. The study reveals that nearly one-quarter (23%) of Americans believe engagement in violent protest against the government can ever be justified, with 10 percent saying it is justified right now. “This is a concerning finding,” said Northwestern political scientist James Druckman. “While it does not suggest that people are currently arming with the intent to engage in political violence, it does reveal that people perceive the country as being at a place where such behavior is reasonable. This coheres with widespread concerns about democratic backsliding.”

In this post, we argue that politics in the transparency, participation, and accountability field happen in time. There is more to politics and change in time than black and white debates about short and long term support. Temporal contexts are about stability and change, timing time horizons, sequences, feedback loops, gradualism vs. shock therapies, etc. They provide a concrete way to to grapple with how agents contribute to scale through different pathways in complex, uncertain systems that make up a world of greys and mixed results — i.e. the world of much TPA work.

Alexander Kähler diskutiert mit: - Karl-Heinz-Brunner, SPD, Verteidigungsexperte - Prof. Marina Henke, Sicherheitsexpertin, Centre for Security Hertie School - Vendeline von Bredow, The Economist - Prof. Helene Miard-Delacroix, Politologin und Historikerin Sorbonne

Political science graduate students have flocked to join #AcademicTwitter in recent years. However, navigating the social media landscape can be daunting for graduate students trying to find their stride. We highlight six different approaches for Twitter among political scientists to provide graduate students a blueprint for navigating the app. Specifically, we note that Twitter can help students find research, promote their own work, ask for advice, and network among other uses. We conclude with tips on maintaining boundaries and ensuring one's safety while using the app.

She had to quit the foreign service to marry. But she was reinstated 16 years later, when female employees challenged the department’s sexist traditions, and she thrived.

The COVID States Project, co-led by political science Prof. Jamie Druckman, tracks varying attitudes and responses to public health guidance across the U.S. Three of their most recent reports examined COVID-19 data considering several socioeconomic factors, which second-year political science Ph.D. student Jennifer Lin said provides an understanding of the development of the pandemic in real time and information in the case of future outbreaks.

Northwestern researcher James Druckman discusses a new survey on masks and at-home tests.

Few principles are as central to American democracy as freedom of speech. Yet, some argue “cancel culture”—i.e., censoring offensive speech—undermines this crucial tenet. The authors offer a theory of why people “cancel” others and test it using a conjoint experiment with a representative sample of Americans. They find that when Americans engage in canceling, they do so because of what was said, regardless of the speaker’s identity. Cancellation reflects an attempt to redress speech considered harmful, not punishment borne of partisan or racial animosity. But the researchers also show that the public is significantly misinformed about cancellation: People overestimate the extent to which canceling occurs and they misconstrue why it happens. Even though partisan bias does not cause canceling, (mis-)beliefs about canceling could exacerbate partisan animosity.

Graduate programs present challenges for women that mirror those in society and are also compounded by entrenched norms within the academy and the discipline. This chapter seeks to guide women-identifying graduate students on navigating these challenges and combat the often isolating experience academia presents. The perception that women are less methodologically and theoretically rigorous in their research is only one of many stressors impacting women in the academy and political science. Through the various lenses of learning, teaching, and research, we provide tangible advice for women in the discipline to find success and balance while creating space for the things that brought you to study political science at a graduate level in the first place.

Is Constructivism best understood as a scholarly disposition, a body of theory, or an intellectual movement? Is it still relevant, or has it exceeded its shelf life? What if there are lots of Constructivists but they use different labels for their work?

Estimados lectores de Vanguardia. A partir hoy los acompañaré como columnista cada quince días. Hace mucho tiempo me formé en la sala de redacción de este periódico en un semillero de jóvenes llamado Sardinos, que publicaba una página quincenal con nuestros escritos. Me da mucha felicidad volver a estas páginas 25 años después para hablar sobre temas de actualidad política, y especialmente sobre las problemáticas que estudié en mi doctorado en Ciencia Política y que investigo como profesora de la Universidad del Rosario.

Graduate programs present challenges for women that mirror those in society and are also compounded by entrenched norms within the academy and the discipline. This chapter seeks to guide women-identifying graduate students on navigating these challenges and combat the often isolating experience academia presents. The perception that women are less methodologically and theoretically rigorous in their research is only one of many stressors impacting women in the academy and political science. Through the various lenses of learning, teaching, and research, we provide tangible advice for women in the discipline to find success and balance while creating space for the things that brought you to study political science at a graduate level in the first place. This manuscript is part of Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond, a forthcoming volume for those interested in pursuing g

Our research, carried out with Lucas González and Antonella Perini, shows that how governments craft a pandemic response matters. National governments that created their pandemic policies in collaboration with other governmental and nongovernmental organizations tended to see fewer covid-related deaths. Collaboration, in this sense, saved lives.

Campaign promises are a cornerstone of representative democracy. Candidates make promises to signal to voters their intentions in office and voters evaluate candidates based on those promises. This study unpacks the theorized pathway regarding campaign promises: not whether promises are kept, but what purpose promises serve, what they signal, and how they affect voter decision-making. The author explores the pathways and conditions influencing promises and finds that promises tend to have a polarizing effect on voters' opinions of politicians, attracting similarly-positioned voters and strongly repelling voters who disagree with a candidate's position. In addition, voters perceive promise breakers as less honest and less likely to follow through than candidates who more weakly took the same position.

In 2012, the Chicago Public Schools board initiated the largest wave of school closures in U.S. history, shutting down 49 out of nearly 500 public schools. These schools were in predominately Black neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides. In the American Political Science Review, IPR political scientist and social policy expert Sally Nuamah and political scientist Thomas Ogorzalek document how the closures changed the political behavior of Black Chicagoans who lived in communities targeted for a school closure. Despite relatively low participation rates in the democratic process before the closures, these citizens—who are from some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods—increased their political engagement. Their research supports a model of place-based mobilization, or the process of citizens responding to policy change concentrated in their local community.

A new law in Illinois allows homeowners to change their housing deeds to remove racist clauses that were used to bar people of certain races and religious groups from buying homes or living in a particular neighborhood.

Images of Kazakh troops wearing United Nations-branded blue peacekeeping helmets, while handling stun grenades during protests in Almaty, crossed a blue line. Anti-government protests that began on January 2 have led to over 160 Kazakhs being killed, thousands injured, and thousands more detained. Despite the violence, the U.N. is not deployed in Kazakhstan. The U.N. has issued a statement asking Kazakh leaders to show “restraint,” and U.N. human right experts condemned the government for labeling the protestors as “terrorists.” Notwithstanding such “a war of words,” these “Little Blue Helmets” – fake U.N. peacekeeping troops – are using a false flag to repress Kazakh citizens. The international community must respond to the unsanctioned use of an internationally protected symbol.

Archive of select American state party platforms 1846-2017 in .txt format

Animal Labour is an important and much needed addition to the field of animal studies (Blattner, Coulter, and Kymlicka, 2020a). In the last few years, animal studies has become a vibrant field of scholarship comprising a broad range of academic disciplines, from animal ethics and critical animal studies to cognitive ethology, among others. But one of the most stimulating recent developments in the field has been the so-called political turn in animal rights theory (Milligan, 2015; Garner and O’Sullivan, 2016). Although the political turn in animal rights theory focuses mainly on issues of citizenship and political representation of animals’ interests, it has remained inattentive to the ethico-political implications of animal labor. Thus, by focusing on animal labor as “a site of interspecies justice” the book fills a void in the literature (Blattner, Coulter, and Kymlicka, 2020b, p. 12).

It is a given in most quarters that that the marginalization of ethnic groups from the corridors of state power is a primary cause of rebellion, particularly in poor countries with weak government control in rural areas open to rebel organizing. Rebellions, however, often emerge among groups that have a share of state power and fail to gain traction among groups that are excluded from power. This observation is at the heart of Janet Lewis's exploration of the earliest stage of rebellion in Uganda, host to 16 rebel groups that Lewis identifies since the current government fought its way to power in 1986. Through extensive field research, including interviews with many directly involved in forming rebel groups and fighting them, Lewis is well positioned to explain why rebel groups succeed or fail in their earliest stages.

So far, Evanston's efforts have yielded a $400,000 fund to be used for grants of up to $25,000 for Black homeowners, who resided in Evanston between 1919 and 1969, that can be used for mortgages or home improvements. This has been lauded as a step toward recognizing and redressing the city's role in racial economic disparities. It's also been criticized for being overly narrow in its eligibility criteria.

Narratives about Africa as dark, depraved, and diseased justified the exploitation of African land and people. Today, these narratives may still have a hold on people’s fears about disease. We test this in three (pre-COVID-19) experiments (N = 1,803). Across studies, we find that participants report greater worry about a pandemic originating in Africa (vs. elsewhere). In turn, they report greater support for travel bans and for loosening abortion restrictions. We then document these narratives in an archival study of newspaper articles of the 2015–2016 Zika pandemic (N = 1,475). We find that articles were more negative—for example, they included more death-related words—if they mentioned Africa. Finally, we replicate the experimental results within the COVID-19 context, using a representative sample (N = 1,200).

The holiday celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an important moment of reflection for me each year. As an African American born three years after the movement Dr. King and others led to make America a multiracial democracy, the course of my life has been fundamentally shaped by the impact of his efforts. Without Dr. King’s work, I would have grown up in a different neighborhood, been educated in schools of lesser quality, and have had far less freedom to move in this society which is typically hostile to Black bodies.

Chloe Thurston, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, authored a book on housing discrimination in the 20th century titled "At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State.""If you have a house that was built before 1950, there's a pretty good chance that there's a restrictive covenant in the deed, particularly if that was a neighborhood that was historically predominantly white," she explained.

The COVID states project conducted a survey and issued a report in the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Here, we revisit some of the opinions regarding January 6th, a year later.

In this re-launch episode of "What Voting Means to Me," Spenser Mestel and Mara discuss this idea and much more. Spencer is an independent journalist and poll worker based in Brooklyn New York— who shares his appreciation for the wonderful and yes, 'forgettable' voting experiences he has had, his hopes for a less burdensome system of voting in the United States, and how elite partisan rhetoric and a lack of public understanding of how elections are run have combined to become a potent threat to American democracy.

“The insurrection, as I would call it, that took place a year ago, was a critical juncture in which the foundation of U.S. democracy eroded a little further,” said Mneesha Gellman, associate professor of political science in the Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative. Gellman said former President Donald Trump’s denial of election results facilitated the events of January 6, and undermined a core aspect of procedural democracy – free and fair elections. That threat has continued over the past year through redistricting, changes in allowable identification at voting locations, timelines to register and submit ballots by mail, closing polling places, and more, said Gellman.

Political Theorist Ross Carroll takes the reader through Enlightenment conversations about the use of ridicule and laughter in politics and political engagement in his new book, Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain (Princeton UP, 2021) explores, as a framework, two schools of thought on the place of ridicule in political engagement, Thomas Hobbes and those who took their approach to understanding human nature from Hobbes, and the Third Earl of Shaftsbury, and those who followed his arguments. Carroll dives into these two approaches to the use of ridicule, unpacking not only the ideas around how ridicule can be used in politics, but also how it might be managed appropriately, noting the dichotomous approach to ridicule as part of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason.

Political Theorist Ross Carroll takes the reader through Enlightenment conversations about the use of ridicule and laughter in politics and political engagement in his new book, Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain (Princeton UP, 2021) explores, as a framework, two schools of thought on the place of ridicule in political engagement, Thomas Hobbes and those who took their approach to understanding human nature from Hobbes, and the Third Earl of Shaftsbury, and those who followed his arguments. Carroll dives into these two approaches to the use of ridicule, unpacking not only the ideas around how ridicule can be used in politics, but also how it might be managed appropriately, noting the dichotomous approach to ridicule as part of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason.

My research and teaching interests are in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic and feminist theory, and the politics of science, technology and the environment (particularly statistics and statecraft, climate science, and contemporary data politics). My book manuscript (tentatively called Common Knowledge) is occasioned by the crisis of authoritative knowledge in democratic societies. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt as well as interdisciplinary literature on democracy and expertise, new communication technologies, and digital publics, it explores how scientific and technical knowledge translates, circulates and becomes contested in the public realm. I also lead an interdisciplinary research project called Arendt on Earth: From the Archimedean Point to the Anthropocene (www.arendtonearth.com), funded by Humanities Without Walls and the Mellon Foundation.

“Perhaps the most disappointing thing that we have learned is that the American people are largely content to watch their democracy burn,” said political scientist Alvin Tillery, director of Northwestern’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy. “Two years after the largest mass protest movement in American history in the name of #BlackLivesMatter and after watching incredibly brave young people strike out for Democracy in places like Hong Kong and Nigeria, the American people are greeting the continuing assault on our democracy with a resounding ‘meh.’ So, on this eve of the one-year anniversary of the Capitol uprising, my warning to Americans, particularly people of color, is that we are not safe.”

For many purposes—notably, responding to a pandemic—a strong federal government is right handy. But for more than 200 years, some Americans, thinking that they were promoting personal liberty, have tried to persuade the Supreme Court to interpret federal law in a way that would hobble the government. It is happening again with Covid-19. And once again the argument focuses on a technical legal question about the meaning of the word necessary. The court gave the right answer in 1819. If it gets it wrong this time, thousands will die.

The International Court of Justice ('ICJ') is the oldest international court in operation, with the authority to adjudicate cases raised by any United Nations member. It has the broadest jurisdiction of any international court, since states can designate or seize the ICJ to resolve disputes involving a broad range of interstate or international matters. The ICJ also has an advisory function, which can be used to clarify questions of international law. The potential for the ICJ to hear cases involving so many countries, treaties and issues means that the relative paucity of cases adjudicated across the ICJ's nearly 75 years in operation is noteworthy. This article argues that the greatest limitation of the ICJ is its interstate nature.

PhD Candidate Timothy Charlebois has received an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship to support his research study at Northwestern University. The SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships support high-calibre students engaged in doctoral programs in the social sciences and humanities. This support allows scholars to fully focus on their doctoral studies, to seek out the best research mentors in their chosen fields, and to contribute to the Canadian research ecosystem during and beyond the tenure of their awards.

Competent elected leaders are often successful in improving the lives of those they serve, but incompetent ones can have an outsized, and even deadly, impact on their citizens, according to IPR political scientist John Bullock. In The Forum, Bullock and Jonathan Bendor of Stanford University argue that researchers should focus more on the competence of elected leaders instead of voter competence, or how well ordinary voters understand politics. The federal government’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic under the Trump administration led the researchers to update their previous essay on the topic. “In 2020, with the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic, we thought that we had a good example that we could use to elaborate the idea,” Bullock explains.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on President Biden's vaccine mandates on Friday, Jan. 7. Officially, the cases are about questions of federal power, administrative law and the capacity of Congress to delegate authority to agencies. But what is fundamentally driving the litigation is the libertarian myth — one that may be embraced by the new conservative Supreme Court majority — that freedom can be promoted by hamstringing the capacities of government.

Experiments are a central methodology in the social sciences. Scholars from every discipline regularly turn to experiments. Practitioners rely on experimental evidence in evaluating social programs, policies, and institutions. This book is about how to “think” about experiments. It argues that designing a good experiment is a slow moving process (given the host of considerations) which is counter to the current fast moving temptations available in the social sciences. The book includes discussion of the place of experiments in the social science process, the assumptions underlying different types of experiments, the validity of experiments, the application of different designs, how to arrive at experimental questions, the role of replications in experimental research, and the steps involved in designing and conducting “good” experiments.